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My understanding is that Supreme Court Justices, much like Federal Reserve Chairmen, are genetically bred to be baffling. But even so, I'm finding Sandra Day O'Connor's anti-Bush tour a bit much. Reading through the New York Times' review of Jeffrey Toobin's ominously named The Nine, much is made of the fact that O'Connor spends most of the book bending Toobin's ear as to the horrors of the Bush administration, and so we get this choice bit:
O’Connor was clearly Toobin’s most important source. She’s also — readers can decide if it’s coincidental — his hero...she spends an awful lot of “The Nine” either annoyed, affronted or downright appalled by the events of the past few years.She was appalled, for instance, by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom she considered extreme, polarizing, moralistic and — to use her favorite word — “unattractive.” She was appalled by how the Bush administration pandered to the religious right in the Terri Schiavo case. She was appalled by the nomination of Harriet Miers. And she’s been appalled, too, by Bush’s stances on affirmative action, the war on terror and the war in Iraq. And how did she feel when Bush brushed off the report of the Iraq Study Group, to which she belonged? She was appalled. And she was really, really appalled that the lower-court judge whose dissent in one crucial case she deemed “repugnant” — he’d have upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring wives to notify husbands before getting abortions — was the very man Bush picked to replace her: Samuel Alito.But it's much worse than that, no? Take O'Connor's ire over Alito. Bush was only able to replace O'Connor with Samuel Alito because O'Connor...voluntarily vacated her seat on the Court, giving a president she apparently believed to be a fool and a villain the ability to inflict those qualities on the Court for the next thirty or so years. Would that more of my enemies made conscious decisions to vastly amplify my ability to reshape the world in accordance with my ideology. But then, people who do that sort of thing don't really qualify as enemies. Or even friends. Indeed, when they not only leave in a way calculated to aid me, but also prove instrumental in making me President of the United States (as O'Connor did in Bush v. Gore), I think they're actually called guardian angels. And just because they want history to judge them otherwise, doesn't make it so.
