WASHINGTON (July 1) - Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court and a swing vote on abortion as well as other contentious issues, announced her retirement Friday. A bruising Senate confirmation struggle loomed as President Bush pledged to name a successor quickly.
''It has been a great privilege indeed to have served as a member of the court for 24 terms,'' the 75-year-old justice wrote Bush in a one-paragraph resignation letter. ''I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the court and its role under our constitutional structure.''
Little more than an hour later, Bush praised O'Connor as ''a discerning and conscientious judge and a public servant of complete integrity.'' He said he would recommend a replacement who will ''faithfully interpret the Constitution and laws of our country.''
The countdown clock to nuclear war in the Senate has just started.
I will say that I was somewhat surprised with O'Conner's retirement. I didn't expect her to step down from the bench until around 2006, or possibly after the 2006 elections. I figured Chief Justice William Rehnquist would retire first, then possibly O'Conner, and finally John Paul Stevens after 2008. Ironically, the O'Conner resignation came as a surprise to the Bush White House as well.
O'Conner's retirement has shredded the judicial compromise on federal judges. O'Conner was a moderate judge, who provided the crucial swing vote in many of the Court's 5-4 decisions on legal issues. The question now is who will President George Bush select to replace O'Conner? Bush can try to select a moderate justice with views similar to O'Conners, however that would cause a huge backlash against the White House by the Religious Right. In addition, Bush has spoken that he favors judges with ideologies similar to both Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia--both are fairly hard-lined conservatives. So whoever George Bush chooses, there is going to be a fight in the Senate, where the Democrats are going to oppose any selection of a hard-lined conservative ideologist to replace a moderate conservative. And if Bush does choose a hard-lined conservative, then the judicial filibuster will come up again. The Democrats in the Senate will use the judicial filibuster against a hard-liner, while Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will argue for the up-or-down rubber stamp vote for the nominee. And if the filibuster comes up, then Frist will try to change the Senate parliamentary rules to outlaw the filibuster against Supreme Court judicial nominees. The Senate will become paralyzed in a bitter partisan war, where no other legislation will go through until after the 2006 midterm elections.
So the question is who is Bush going to choose? Is he going to choose a hard-liner or a moderate in ideology? The Religious Right are certainly putting pressure on both Bush and Frist to get an ideologist on the bench that could overturn abortion. The Democrats are mobilizing to stop this action. We are only now in the beginnings of this long and bitter war between ideologies. But there is another battle I should also point out. For whoever Bush selects to the Supreme Court, that nominee will also be very receptive to big, corporate business interests. This nominee will certainly side with everything pro-business, and would probably be against any type of consumer protections or consumer rights, or even legal rights for consumers. You could expect to see consumer protection laws weakened. Consumers may not be able to sue corporations for health or safety violations on products and services. Corporations could end up being legally shielded from class-action lawsuits by consumers. Business lobbyists and corporate interests are probably already talking with White House officials about who they would like to see on the bench. And with the White House being so receptive to big business, you can be they are happily listening and agreeing to big business.
This is only the start of a long and bitter war.
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