The Democrats have been urging the president and the public that only somebody in the mold of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor can rightly be appointed to fill “the O’Connor seat.”
But there is no O’Connor seat.
Democrats forget, the American Thinker points out, that justices before O’Connor held that seat.
The Thinker provides a romp through the history of “the O’Connor seat:”
“Democrats might have a better argument about ‘O’Connor’s Seat’ being a ‘swing vote’ if they took the time to have one of their flunkies do some research. Justice Stewart was not a reliable vote for either liberal or conservative bloc. However, Democrats will probably wish to steer clear of Justice Stewart’s more famous opinions, such as his upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty despite his personal objections. In 1965 he dissented from the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut and wrote that while the state law banning contraceptives was “uncommonly silly” it was not unconstitutional.
“Most embarrassing for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who might want to argue that Stewart’s…err…O’Connor’s seat is a ‘swing’ vote and can be nothing else would be for someone to cite Justice Stewart’s dissenting opinion in Abington School District v. Schempp in 1962. Justice Stewart wrote that the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment sometimes came into ‘irreconcilable conflict’ and that ‘separation of church and state’ was an elusive goal (and not part of the Constitution) because ‘religion and government must necessarily interact in countless ways.'”
But even before Potter Stewart, somebody sat in Sandra Day O’Connor’s chair:
“Justice Stewart preceded Harold Burton on the Court, a strict constructionist who was appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1945. Justice Burton supported laws discouraging Communist activity within the United States, the desegregation of public schools and public transportation. While some might point to Justice Burton’s concurrence preventing the President from seizing steel mills in the face of a labor strike as a liberal position, Justice Burton could find nothing in the Constitution that gave the President the authority to make such a move.”