Opposition to Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981
Conservatives Knew the Truth: She Couldn't Be Trusted
Sandra Day O’Connor was always a pro-abortion nutjob.
When she was in the Arizona legislature in 1970 she voted to decriminalize abortion by eliminating the laws against it.
So when she was nominated to the Court in 1981, pro-life groups were understandably concerned.
Their concerns were dismissed out-of-hand, and they were patronizingly told that O’Connor was ‘personally pro-life.’ A common refrain with a euphemism meaning nothing. If your principles don’t animate your views and actions then they’re merely choices not philosophy.
In any case it’s not surprising that secretly pro-abortion elements pushed O’Connor. What’s telling, rather, is how many supposedly ‘pro-life’ outlets pushed her.
Pro-abortion Sen. Barry Goldwater at least had the decency to only talk down to people without lying to them: he said it shouldn’t matter that she was pro-abortion because, hey, he was personally pro-abortion.
“White House spokesman Larry Speakes said she, like Reagan, is opposed to abortion.”
White House spokesman Larry Speakes just lied to the public and to Reagan’s voters by saying O’Connor was actually pro-life! But you can count on White House press flaks, even then, to be pathological liars.
The political left was busy gaslighting America too, saying that O’Connor was the kind of principled ‘classic conservative’ that the left could accept.
It’s amazing anyone fell for this shit.
Now it’s tempting to say that well, maybe Spokesman Larry didn’t know. But if Larry didn’t know, he shouldn’t have said that he did know.
The version of this story I once heard was that the person assigned at the Justice Department to call Arizona Right to Life and ensure that O’Connor was truly pro-life was none other than Kenneth Starr of Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky fame.
So the story goes, the call was never made.
If that’s true, that Starr was the person supposed to be vetting the nominee, that he was supposed to call Arizona pro-lifers, and didn’t, certainly begs the question why Starr didn’t make the call.
The person who first relayed this story to me insinuated nefarious motives. The fix was in, and proper Presidential procedure wasn’t to be followed.
In 1970 the Arizona legislature passed HB20 that repealed all the state’s abortion laws. At the time Sandra Day O’Connor was a State Senator representing Maricopa. She was a Senator from 1969-1975 before becoming a judge.
All you needed to review was April 30, 1970 of the Arizona Republic that talked about HB20 coming through the Senate. Here’s the article:
Read the first paragraph and the fifth paragraph and it tells you everything you need to know.
Then…
The President’s spokesman says that Sandy shares his pro-life views. Even though she voted to repeal all abortion restrictions just a decade prior.
Fellow Arizonan Barry Goldwater knew who she really was, which is why he didn’t even bother trying to hide the obvious fact: O’Connor was pro-abortion all along.
They were all just lying to the public: Reagan, Speakes, Starr, O’Connor.
The only one even trying to be honest is Senator Goldwater by saying it shouldn’t matter.
O’Connor gave off plenty of warning signs that were well documented in the local press. She attended Planned Parenthood’s events in Arizona, she listened to presentations by Paul Ehrlich about “The Population Bomb,” and O’Connor even gave presentations using the left-wing codewords of the day, ‘equal rights’ for women which never ends up meaning anything equal in practice.
Plenty of articles would have given you the idea that she had well-formed opinions on abortion, in support of it. In this article just read the fifth paragraph.
If you had spent any time looking, it would not have been hard to determine O’Connor’s pro-abortion politics and history of supporting abortion.
It’s notable that candidate Reagan was not as pro-life as many have made him out to be in hindsight. Reagan specifically said that he would nominate judges regardless of their views on abortion.
Reagan’s record on abortion was also, frankly, pretty bad. This advertisement from 1980 lays it all out pretty well.
I had never heard about the Governor Reagan penchant for charging women ‘rent’ for their babies in utero by deducting it from their welfare payments.
Sounds like a potential new film genre: dystopian libertarianism.
And perhaps that’s the most important lesson from all this is that the political right has lionized Reagan on abortion because some of his nominees were prominent conservative thinkers, like Justice Antonin Scalia in 1986 and a year later the failed 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, with the benefit of hindsight, that had the political left agreed to the Bork nomination, and if Bork in this new timeline still died in 2012, how that might have affected abortion rights in a different way. If the Planned Parenthood v. Casey court in 1992 was unwilling to overturn Roe, would the then-dissenters have had the courage to actually do so? I think it’s conceivable that the odd doctrine of stare decisis may have prevailed over the passion to undo Roe.
The court is a political institution, and it has to bend and change with the political winds. The inaction on abortion law in the face of decades of state regulation and decades of pro-lifers properly engaging the political process to get a specific result had to end up somewhere. To let all of that political action result in another pro-abortion ruling despite the law, politics, history, would have been a step too far.
O’Connor was always on the wrong side of the political winds. Her decisions and her rulings are some of the most incoherent legal ramblings of the last half century second only to the absolutely incoherent Stephen Breyer.
Individuals at Arizona Right to Life claim they were never contacted prior to the nomination to ask whether they were satisfied that this was a good pick for the nation’s top court. It’s possible this is a cope or otherwise untrue. I’m trusting them to be honest in their recollections.
It’s also a significant assumption that even if Arizona Right to Life had been consulted, whether their opinion would have influenced the appointment. There was significant political pressure to appoint a woman, and O’Connor fit the political needs of the White House. That pressure may have overridden the desire to placate the President’s supposed pro-life principles. It’s hard to have a firm answer here because politicians are so adept at concealing their true beliefs.
But if these are accurate assumptions and the facts as stated are true, the phone-call-that-wasn’t was quite consequential. The ACLU was kind enough to make a list of all the horrible rulings where Justice O’Connor was the deciding vote.
History and American society relied on Ken Starr having the competence to make a phone call. Apparently we expected too much.
