We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. - Vince Lombardi

Friday, July 01, 2005

Wow, I wake up to this.

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.”

Let’s see who Bush picks, whether it’s a rigid socially conservative ideologue, or more of a states-rights libertarian type.  The whole thing is going to come down to abortion, because that’s the main “right” that the left in this country wants to protect.  The Democrats will never, ever, support a candidate who is against abortion.  And since the MoveOn crowd is undoubtedly going to go into overdrive on this one, see if you can guess who said this.

George W. Bush is not going to appoint justices who would overturn Roe vs. Wade. He hasn’t done it in Texas, and that’s the only track record we have to look at. He’s appointed moderate justices who have upheld Texas abortion laws. He’s not a right-wing ideologue, he’s a politician, and he’ll do whatever he has to do to get elected. He reads the poll numbers, and two-thirds of the American public is pro-choice. It is part of our American culture, it will never go away. And in fact, all of the Supreme Court decisions lately that have upheld abortion have been because the Republican, Reagan-appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Bush-appointed David Souter and Ford-appointed Justice Stevens have all been the ones upholding abortion. One of Clinton’s appointees, Breyer, is becoming very conservative.  We just don’t know.  Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren, and that became the most liberal court of the last hundred years. It’s a guessing game, and I’m not going to make my choice on presidents based on this sort of thing.

That, my friends, was the calm, reasoned, logical Michael Moore, in an 2000 interview.