Sandra Day O’Connor’s complicity
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It is true, as far as it goes, that on net Sanday Day O’Connor’s pragmatism and willingness to compromise made her on net better than yer Alitos and Thomases. We should also remember that her pragmatism and thinking-like-a-politician had its own dark side, most notably in her career-defining disgrace in 2000:
Lol wait sorry, she was despairing about Gore apparently winning on Election Night. The voter fraud conspiracy theories came AFTER she was already involved in the case, which is, incredibly, even worse!— Jay Willis (@jaywillis) December 1, 2023
Even before the inside information came out, at the oral argument in Bush v. Gore O’Connor repeatedly expressed her frustration at voters who (in her mind) could not follow simple rules. This led her to provide the swing vote for a wholly lawless opinion overruling a state court’s reasonable and principled application of state law and denying the will of the state’s voters, all in favor of the candidate she was hoping would win so she could retire.
It is true as well that she half-preserved Roe v. Wade for additional 30 years. But in a story that says so much about how moderate Republicans who didn’t just leave the party have let it go the full Trump with little meaningful resistance, there was a good test to determine how strongly the Casey joint plurality really cared about preserving abortion rights. Souter resigned so that he could be replaced by a justice who would affirm Roe (and it remains remarkable that the two liberal Republicans on the Court strategically retired under Obama and the two liberal Democrats refused to, in one case with tragic and devastating results.) O’Connor, on the other hand, handed her seat to the author of Dobbs, and Kennedy knowingly handed his to one of the five votes in the majority. Kennedy had pretty much gone full Fox News Grandpa by the end of his pathetic last term, anyway — he was less a collaborator with Trumpism than just a Trumpista. O’Connor apparently didn’t like the direction of the party under Bush — but when the rubber hit the road she helped to ensure that the Bush-Trump line of Republicans would have a hammerlock on the Supreme Court and undo any good work she happened to do. In the end, she was Bush v. Gore all the way down.