Bill Kristol called it on O’Connor’s retirement.

Let’s hope he is wrong about her replacement:

President Bush will appoint Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to replace O’Connor. Bush certainly wants to put Gonzales on the Supreme Court. Presidents usually find a way to do what they want to do.

As National Review put it:

[T]he president has to know that conservatives, his supporters in good times and bad, would be appalled and demoralized by a Gonzales appointment. It would place his would-be successors in the Senate in a difficult position, forcing them to choose between angering conservatives by voting for Gonzales and saying no to him. If Democrats attack Gonzales — and it is reasonable to expect that they will attack almost any Bush nominee — conservatives will not rally to his defense.

The president has led an admirable campaign for a reformation of the federal judiciary. If he names a conservative nominee, he will have a battle on his hands. But it is a battle worth fighting.

The excellent SCOTUS Nomination Blog has links to profiles of other leading candidates.

1127pm. Jonathan Turley says on Fox News that “Conservatives may come to appreciate Gonzales” as a SCOTUS candidate. I rather doubt that.

John Derbyshire: “I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the SCOTUS nominee will not be a white male of European ancestry.”

Jonathan Adler at Bench Memos: “The key question facing the White House is when to name O’Connor’s replacement. Obviously the administration wants a new justice before the Court reconvenes in October. Yet Fox reported today that the Senate Judiciary Committee expects to take several weeks to gear up for hearings on any nominee. If that’s the case, activist groups would have ample time to gin up opposition to any nominee — and it could be difficult to get a vote before the August recess.”

More on the women who may be on the shortlist:

Edith Brown Clement
Edith Hollan Jones

More inside stuff from Erick at ConfirmThem.com:

* This morning John Cornyn was seen at the White House. He is rumored to have then had a private meeting with key staffers.
* Last my source told me this morning, Garza is still at the top of the list.
* As for Rehnquist? Several key players in the Senate were told by the White House that he was out this week. My source says the White House went into confusion mode over this. Everyone had expected Rehnquist.
* As for Gonzales. POTUS is POTUS and sources tell me that though the political calculus equates to suicide, POTUS still wants Gonzales.

Polipundit: “My choices to replace O’Connor are either Judge Janice Rogers Brown, or Judge Priscilla Owen. Both are sufficiently conservative, young, and female. And both were just confirmed by large margins by the US Senate. It would be very difficult for the “Gang of 14″ compromisers to filibuster either of them.”

Joshua Claybourn at In the Agora has background on another candidate, Judge Emilio Garza.

Danny Glover’s Beltway Blogroll: Let The Supreme Court Blog War Begin

Read Hugh Hewitt’s very graceful post on O’Connor.

Ramesh Ponnuru is not so charitable:

Her split-the-difference, compromising jurisprudence may have been designed to promote social peace, but if so it backfired. In two ways, it made the politics of Supreme Court confirmations more bitter. First, it tended to inflate the role of the Supreme Court in American life. When the Court sets itself up as a micromanager of policy decisions and provides no clear guidance as to what passes “constitutional” muster and what doesn’t, the stakes in any confirmation get higher. Second, her career on the Court–along with those of Justices Kennedy, Souter, and to a lesser extent Stevens–made the Right suspicious of nominees whose loyalty to conservative principles had not been explicitly demonstrated. Conservatives learned that nominees often drifted left, and almost never drifted right, and adjusted their demands accordingly. It may not be the legacy she wanted, but it’s the one she’s left.

***
Coverage of the coverage: FOX News’s Brian Wilson broke the story on TV. TVNewser has more. Beating the broadcasters, guest-blogger Mary Katherine Ham at Wizbang was first on the draw on the ‘net. MKH is a regular at Townhall.com, which has full coverage.

Video at The Political Teen.

Southern Appeal: Feddie is rallying conservatives to “keep the pressure on your senators to nix a Gonzales nomination.”

John Hawkins rounds up liberal reaction to O’Connor’s resignation.

My friend William Perry Pendley e-mails:

We should not forget that Justice O’Connor saw racial preferences and quotas in government contracting for the evil that it is. In 1989, she wrote for the Court in the Croson case ending racial preferences by the City of Richmond. In 1990, when the Court lost its way on the issue and upheld racial preferences and quotas by the federal government (FCC), she dissented powerfully in Metro Broadcasting. Then, in 1995, in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, she wrote for the Court that no government–federal, state, or local–may use racial preferences or quotas except under the most compelling of circumstances. It is unfortunate that the Court did not have the opportunity, before Justice O’Connor retired, to apply the test she set forth to federal government contracting; however, that day will come and when it does, legal scholars believe that government contracting preferences and quotas based on race and ethnicity are doomed. They are doomed because of her opinion in Adarand. (For example, the federal highway bill that soon will be on its way to President Bush’s desk contains that “odious” program.) Those who believe in the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee owe Justice O’Connor their gratitude.

comments (0)   trackbacks (55)