O'Connor Urged to Reconsider Retirement

Please Sandy, don't leave. It just won't be the same without you. What can we do to get you to stay? Better parking space? Free gas? How about Chief Justice for a year? Well, two out of three she already has. It is the third carrot that liberals and left-leaning Republicans are dangling in front of Associate Justice O'Connor if she stays on pending the retirement of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

WASHINGTON - Four female senators called Thursday for retiring Supreme Court Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor to stay on the court and try for chief justice if the ailing
William Rehnquist steps down.

Once again, those who lean to the left like to call for things "if" something happens.

In a letter to O'Connor, Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Barbara Boxer of California asked the nation's first female justice to consider staying on the high court if Chief Justice Rehnquist relinquishes the top spot.

The last I checked, Rehnquist wasn't too eager to retire. In fact, he reminded me of that old Master Chief who had to be dragged down the brow.

Rehnquist was discharged Thursday after two nights in the hospital for treatment of a fever. O'Connor announced her retirement on July 1, but has made it conditional on a replacement being confirmed.

"We urge you to reconsider your resignation and return to the Supreme Court to serve as chief justice, should there be a vacancy," the senators said in the Thursday letter.

There is a vacancy and she created it. Has Justice O'Connor ever indicated that she would like to serve in a leadership capacity. Has she authored a significant number of opinions -- dissenting or otherwise?

The four senators also said they will "strongly recommend" to President Bush that O'Connor become the next chief justice if Rehnquist steps down.

"We believe such a history-making nomination by the president would demonstrate leadership that unites Americans around the shared values of liberty, the rule of law and the preservation of our constitutional freedoms," they said.

Any nomination to the land's highest court is history-making. The Senate Judiciary Committee is the body that has the chance to unite Americans around the values we cherish. Simply do what you are supposed to do -- vote -- and be done with it.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and top Judiciary Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont first publicly stoked speculation about a possible O'Connor candidacy for chief justice on Sunday.

"I think it would be quite a capping to her career if she served for a time, maybe a year or so," Specter said.

Given the praise O'Connor has received since her retirement announcement, she would be a lock to be confirmed as chief justice, Leahy said. "I think it would be a very doable thing," he said Sunday.

Twnety-plus years on the bench and no one mentions her name and the word chief in the same sentence.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued in a speech to the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society that Bush's team will probably conduct an ideological examination of the prospective nominees in private before sending a candidate to the Senate.

Schumer acts as if an ideological assessment of a candidate for the highest office in the land is something strange. Charlie, haven't you and your cohorts been conducting just such an examination of the yet to be named justice since Associate Justice O'Connor announcer her retirement?

"If a nominee's ideology, judicial philosophy, constitutional views are central considerations in a president's decision to nominate, as they inevitably are, and if such questioning is going on in private, I dare say that the American people have an absolute right to have those questions answered publicly," Schumer said.

I couldn't agree more. Now stop your posturing, take a nap if need be and be prepared to do the one thing a Senator is expected to do. Vote (it's that little button by your right hand).

Open Post Thanks to The Mudville Gazette.