{"id":4589,"date":"2005-07-01T10:39:39","date_gmt":"2005-07-01T14:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4589.html"},"modified":"2005-07-01T10:39:39","modified_gmt":"2005-07-01T14:39:39","slug":"sandra-day-oconnor-is-retiring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/sandra-day-oconnor-is-retiring\/","title":{"rendered":"Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been waiting for a Supreme Court retirement, but it turns out, we were watching the wrong justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice and a decisive swing vote for a quarter-century on virtually all the major legal issues of our time, announced her resignation today.<\/p>\n

Because she is a moderate, her departure gives President Bush a major opportunity to alter the direction of the court if he so chooses.<\/p>\n

O’Connor’s possible resignation has been rumored for months, although many thought Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who has been ailing with cancer, would go first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the conventional wisdom believed that Rehnquist would retire, the opportunity for a major shift in the court’s direction was minimal. Rehnquist is a conservative, Bush would replace him with a younger conservative, and the balance of the high court would remain largely the same.<\/p>\n

O’Connor, however, is the definitive moderate swing vote on the Supreme Court. The overwhelming number of 5-4 decisions has generally been directed by her willingness to go with one side or the other.<\/p>\n

The political fight over a Supreme Court vacancy was going to be a massive, expensive, and ugly fight when Rehnquist was the subject of speculation, but with O’Connor stepping down, that same fight will be intensified significantly.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

Update<\/em>: Here’s the text<\/a> of O’Connor’s retirement letter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve been waiting for a Supreme Court retirement, but it turns out, we were watching the wrong justice. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice and a decisive swing vote for a quarter-century on virtually all the major legal issues of our time, announced her resignation today. Because she is a moderate, her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}