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The Difference That Sandra Day O’Connor Made

3Dec

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The Difference That Sandra Day O’Connor Made

Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court Justice who over and over again provided the deciding vote on divisive constitutional matters, did not like the term often applied to her: “swing voter.” It sounded irresolute, and O’Connor, who grew up on a vast cattle ranch in Arizona and pushed past enough routine sexism in her career to choke a horse (in the early nineteen-fifties, one top firm explained that it couldn’t possibly hire her as a lawyer, but maybe as a legal secretary), was nothing if not resolute. In a 2013 NPR interview, O’Connor, who died on Friday at the age of ninety-three, told Terry Gross, “I don’t think any Justice—and I hope I was not one—would swing back and forth and just try to make decisions not based on legal principles but on where you thought the direction should go,...

Will Republicans Defend the Supreme Court?

Senate Democrats can’t accept that the Supreme Court no longer does their policy bidding, so they’re trying to discredit it. The latest effort is a subpoena threat against the friends of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.Led by Sheldon Whitehouse and his spokesman Dick Durbin, the Judiciary Committee has been threatening subpoenas against Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo and Robin Arkley II. Their supposed crime: bestowing “lavish, undisclosed gifts” on the Justices, enabling “private access to the justices” while “preventing public scrutiny,” and contributing to a Supreme Court “ethical crisis of its own making.” Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Clarence Thomas’s R.V. Loan and Supreme Court Scrutiny

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter.Justice Clarence Thomas is once again under the spotlight—this time, for a forgiven R.V. loan. In the nineteen-nineties, a wealthy friend loaned Thomas more than a quarter of a million dollars to purchase a forty-foot motor coach. A Senate inquiry has now found that Thomas’s loan was later forgiven; this discovery raises questions about the ethics of the deal. Over the years, the conduct of Justices appointed by both Democratic and Republican Presidents has been in question, the staff writer Jane Mayer explains, “but there is nothing that comes near the magnitude of goodies that have been taken by Clarence Thomas”: if Thomas “were in any other branch of go...