We all knew this day was coming. I thought it would be Rehnquist first, though.
(VOA News) Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, has announced that she is retiring.
The 75-year-old Ms. O’Connor sent a letter to President Bush, Friday stating that she will leave the court when her successor is nominated and confirmed. She said it has been a great privilege to have served on the Supreme Court for the past 24 years.
Over the years, Ms. O’Connor cast the deciding vote in many 5-4 cases that dealt with hotly contested issues such as abortion and the death penalty.
Her resignation is expected to set off an intense political battle between Republicans and Democrats over who will fill her seat.
Given Bush’s and Congress’s poor approval numbers at the moment, I wonder if that will moderate the choice Bush is forced to make. Have the Democrats built up enough of a spine yet to force the issue?
I know the Religious Reich is going to pull out all of the stops. This is really going to motivate “the base” to push Bush toward a far-right nominee. If that happens, the Democrats may get pushed into the corner and be forced to filibuster. Then we get “Cat Killer” Frist implementing the “nu-cu-ler” option and we get the double-whammy of a more conservative court and an extreme limitation on minority power in the Senate. It’s the radical restructuring of two branches of government for the price of one!
Or maybe this turns into the kind of infighting between the moderate and conservative factions of the GOP that turns that lame duck president even lamer. Maybe Dems stick to their guns and we get a surprising moderate justice who’s more of a swing vote than O’Connor. And maybe the Republican divisiveness helps trigger in a backlash that allows us to retake the House in 2006 and make the next Democrat’s presidential run a successful one.
I don’t know. If I could tell the future with any accuracy I would have invested in Yahoo when I had the chance.
(CNN) O’Connor, 75, was appointed by President Reagan in 1981 and is considered a moderate conservative on the high court and often cast the pivotal swing vote in important cases.
The list of cases in which her vote made the difference is long and notable: limiting affirmative action (Adarand 1995 case requiring “compelling” government interest), permitting public aid and vouchers to religious and parochial schools (Agostini and 2002 Zelman/Cleveland cases), and in several abortion-related cases, where a woman’s reproductive rights were narrowly re-affirmed (Casey, Cathcart cases).
The Bush White House has held secret meetings on possible replacements and senior officials have interviewed some candidates.
On Friday, Bush said he is looking for candidates “who meet a high standard of legal ability, judgment and integrity, and who will faithfully interpret the Constitution and laws of our country.”
Bush is so good at speaking to the base in their political code. “Faithfully interpret the Constitution” sounds, on the surface, to be a reasonable thing to require of a justice. But the base believes most of the progressive decisions of the past seventy years (especially Roe v. Wade) to be poor interpretations of the Constitution.
