Why One Shouldn’t Shed a Tear for Sandra Day O’Connor
Why Sandra Day O’Connor was loved, and why she doesn’t deserve our love.
By
David Gottfried
The idiot commentators on our 24-hour cable news networks are blathering on about the glories of that allegedly wonderful woman, Sandra Day O’Connor. They are making this writer, who is in love with language, detest the English language because every word out of their mouths sounds like the disingenuous drivel of a dingbat.
In EM Forster’s “Howard’s End,” one of the characters disgustedly says that art is something for rich people to discuss after dinner. I feel this way about so much of our political discourse as it is fluff, irrelevant, besides the point and is meant to help us pretend that life is not as mean as it really is.
As I am writing this, mentally ill people are being beaten and maimed in prisons (I had a case in which an inmate lost three fingers because of a sadistic prison guard), elderly people have been marinating in their urine in sheets, in nursing homes, that haven’t been changed since Maggie Thatcher had her last period, tenements are poisoning slum dwellers with all manner of environmental toxins -- and the so-called left, instead of heeding the agonies that warrant repair, are busy being bean counters, having hissy fits if a school is 18 percent black instead of 19 percent black, and the rich sons of bitches of the conservative camp are laughing all the way to the bank. And the monstrous media thinks that the death of a rich white woman, Judge Sandy – a woman who had a full and famous life -- is so damn newsworthy that that some stations had their cameras trained on each and every segment of the boring Protestant funeral service.
Her Jurisprudential Approach: Reagan Conservatism Mixed with Middle of the Road Mediocrity
Of course, Sandra Day O’Connor was loved the very minute she came to Washington. She was loved for the same reason that Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice were loved. She is a woman, but she clearly was a conservative woman, nominated to the Supreme Court by none other than President Ray Gun Reagan, the apotheosis of conservative dreams for the last third of the 20th Century. Since Reagan picked her, conservatives had no choice but to love her. Since she was a woman, rich liberal ladies were apt to jump up and down and love her to bits.
Ah, but the talking heads are telling us that she was so much more than that. She was, supposedly, very adept at compromise, and bringing together the liberal and conservative wings on the Supreme Court like the Den Mother of a Bunch of disagreeable boy scouts. As a Den Mother, her judicial authority was more acceptable to die hard social conservatives who feel their cock might fall off every time they encounter a woman with moxie. And what did O’Connor do as she brought the bad boys of the Court together?
We are told that she brought the Court together to forge a centrist consensus.
O’Connor’s Supposedly Moderate Judicial Consensus Implicitly Affirmed and Accelerated the Nation’s Right-Wing Trajectory
The idea that she forged a centrist consensus is one of the biggest loads of manure the American People are Being Force-fed.
During her tenure, the ratio of CEO income to assembly line worker income went from 50 to 1 to 500 to 1. In other words, more and more money went to fewer and fewer people.
When the economy is hurtling toward severe income equality, any political or legal stance, other than a strident pro-worker stance, is in effect a very right-wing stance because one’s moderation serves to affirm the right-wing trajectory of the nation. In other words, if more and more millionaires are becoming billionaires, and more and more working class tenants are becoming homeless, people in government have an obligation to stem the tide toward severe class polarization, and if they do not, if they give us mealy-mouthed politics that is nothing but middling moderation, their sissified centrism affirms and exults in the degradation of working people and poor people.
Furthermore, Judge Sandy wasn’t much of a centrist. On economic issues she was steadfastly conservative, and the US Supreme Court very often sought to do nothing other than enact into law the fetid fancies of the United States Chamber of Commerce. But the bullshit media, including the bullshit liberal media, pretends that the Supreme Court never takes cases that involve economics. Most Americans have the completely ludicrous conception that the Supreme Court only deals with abortion and “hot button” social issues. However, sometimes it is the “cool button” economic issues that really count, especially when an evicted tenant’s body gets cooler and cooler and then is discovered, the day after Christmas, stone cold dead on the street, the street empty except for the broken champagne bottles thrown there from the limousines taking rich republican kiddies to expensive parties.
Furthermore, on hot button issues such as abortion, she was not much of a moderate. I will never forget that in a Supreme Court case decided, if I recall correctly, in 1982 or 1983, she sardonically prophesied the over-turning of Roe v. Wade. In this case, she said that Roe was “on a collision course with itself,” and that as medical advances made fetal viability possible at earlier and earlier points in time, Roe’s days would be numbered. She never actually called for getting rid of Roe, but her snide arguments about the durability of Roe did not exactly aid the abortion rights movement.
The scold and the shrew underneath the veneer of amiability
She was like a rich bitch of a lady who kicked coal dust in her old char woman’s eyes, and this image came to me during oral argument, before the high Court, in Bush v. Gore.
She saw fit to address the problems elderly people had with the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida. It was a nightmare ballot designed to disenfranchise people who did not have 20-20 vision.
She did not ask a legal question. She did not really ask a question based in fact. Rather, it was a bitchy, rhetorical stab in the back to people who had trouble seeing, whom she suggested were really just irresponsible lower-class dregs. I don’t remember the exact language she used, but this is the gist of her question/comment/sarcastic verbal fisticuff in oral argument: “For heaven’s sake, don’t those people have enough sense to know how to handle a ballot.” Bitch, have a little sympathy and heart for an 85-year-old lady, hunched over and barely able to walk, who after decades of dealing with normal ballots is confronted with a warped ballot designed by a yuppie from hell.
Sandra Day O’Connor’s Biggest Judicial Sin
Of course, her biggest sin was a sin that was, in a sense, an omen of Donald Trump and the destruction of democracy in this country. It was something that the Supreme Court threw in toward the end of the Bush-Gore decision.
The Court said: “This case will have no precedential effect.”
When I read those words, I knew that equality before the law was now being denied in law as well as in fact.
Precedent means that we are all to be treated equal. Precedent means that if the Court rules in Abbott v. Costello that axe murderers should get the death penalty, then the Court must follow that precedent in Jimmy Stewart v. Jackie Gleason because all axe murderers are to be treated equally.
Sometimes precedent makes me ill, because the perpetuation of legal rules leads to ossification and retards progress and innovation, but precedent, at least, makes us equal.
When one dispenses with precedent, one can treat some people worse than other people. When the Court dispenses with precedent, it can use a legal rule which is horrendously prejudiced against Al Gore and not have to use it again because Precedent has been amputated from our system of jurisprudence.
In a word, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the other justices who voted to make Bush president, amputated one of the most important features of American jurisprudence, the belief that we should all be given equal treatment before the law.