From O’Connor to Barrett… What A Contrast In Women Picked For High Court By GOP Presidents

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Thirty-nine years elapsed between a Republican president’s first nomination of a woman to the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan announcing Sandra Day O’Connor in July 1981, and the second, Donald Trump’s selection of Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020. What a world of difference between the two.
In the meantime, liberal Democrat Presidents Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama successfully nominated three pro-abortion women to the High Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Reagan sprang a surprise on everyone in summer 1981 with the name of Arizona’s pro-abortion O’Connor, despite pro-lifers across the nation having worked their hearts out less than a year earlier to help win the presidency in November 1980 for the former California governor.
He refused to back away from this betrayal, and the establishment was too happy to get O’Connor, who had never served on a federal bench, confirmed to what turned out to be more than 24 full years on the High Court, from September 1981 through her retirement in January 2006.
In contrast, Trump, with a proven pro-life record, openly disclosed the names of legal experts he was considering, none of them viewed as pro-abortionists, then fulfilled his pledge most recently by announcing Barrett on September 26, in the fourth year of his presidency.
For many, Barrett quickly became “ACB,” a conservative counterpoint to the left’s AOC for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and RBG for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Whenever a vacancy occurs on the bench for the ultimate referee of U.S. law, pro-abortionists get the jitters because they know there’s nothing legally substantial supporting Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which was only the personal policy preference of a majority of pro-abortion justices on January 22, 1973.
Simply to interpret U.S. law faithfully would mean this ukase must be overturned. But a powerful U.S. establishment and a hyena baby-eating dominant media always howl in horror at the very thought that the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of an unalienable right to life would be restored to the preborn.
Later in this article: more about the strategy behind ramming through Ronald Reagan’s betrayal by confirming O’Connor, and how far pro-lifers have come since 1981. But first a look at the newest nominee.
Barrett had been confirmed to serve on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in October 2017 after teaching as an acclaimed professor on the law faculty of the University of Notre Dame since 2002. During this federal court confirmation by the U.S. Senate, her record and views had been thoroughly vetted while liberal Democrats directly attacked her Catholic faith.
In light of this examination, no extended hearings should be necessary now for her Supreme Court appointment, although left-wing Senate Democrats and their interest groups seem likely to try every trick they can to delay her being seated. But even they may hesitate to display the counterproductive open anti-Catholic bigotry that fuels them after it backfired in 2017.
Still, the rage that bubbles through left-wing activism shortly was asserting such incredible transgressions as Barrett’s alleged reverse racism for having adopted two black children from Haiti. For bringing them into her family, she supposedly committed such offenses as stealing them from their parents or viewing them as “savages” in need of reformation.
The Washington Examiner posted on September 28 that upon the announcement of Barrett’s nomination, feminist journalist Christine Grimaldi tweeted: “This whole press conference is a display of Amy Coney Barrett weaponizing her white womanhood to grab whatever power managed to slip through the cracks in the Trump administration’s unrelenting misogyny.”
Grimaldi fumed that the president and his nominee “using her black children and child with Down syndrome to score political points isn’t surprising, but it’s no less appalling.”
However, Australian journalist Rita Panahi retorted: “What would the hateful Left have Amy Coney Barrett do? Hide her black children? Only appear in public with her white, non-disabled children? These people are sick.”
Considering what loony left-wing activists repellently asserted against Justice Brett Kavanaugh only two years ago, it probably wouldn’t be surprising, although still pitiful, to be told soon that Barrett ran a brothel while in high school. And considering what left-wing rioters have been doing lately, the Barrett family, it is to be hoped, is mindful of its security.
However, not everyone who disagrees with her judicial outlook tried to drag her through the mud so soon.
Noah Feldman, a liberal law professor at Harvard University, wrote in a September 26 opinion column at the Bloomberg website that as two clerks at the U.S. Supreme Court more than 20 years ago, “When assigned to work on an extremely complex, difficult case, especially one involving a hard-to-comprehend statutory scheme, I would first go to Barrett to explain it to me.”
Describing Barrett as “highly qualified” to serve as a justice, Feldman wrote: “I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy and expect to disagree with many, maybe even most of her future votes and opinions. Yet despite this disagreement, I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed.
“Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them,” he wrote.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on September 28:
“Conservatives are optimistic about Barrett, they believe she’d be a faithful interpreter of the Constitution, and that she won’t legislate from the bench.
“Of course, the challenge with Supreme Court appointees is that those nominated by Democrat presidents are reliably liberal and stay liberal for as long as they are on the court,” Querard said. “Republicans generally appoint justices they believe will be conservative, but an alarming percentage of them are either immediate disappointments (David Souter) or drift left the longer they’re on the court (John Roberts), so Republican picks always come with an element of risk.”
On the other hand, such veteran justices as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (the latter succeeding O’Connor) appear to have resisted this drift.
Querard added: “Republicans have made it clear that they will confirm Barrett before the election, as they should. They understand the importance of doing their jobs and they know their base would be incredibly unforgiving should they fail. The Democrats will lose their minds in predictable fashion, but they have their rage cranked all the way to 11 on a permanent basis now, so it makes no difference if they threaten to get ‘more upset’.”
One slogan of the feminism that began in the latter twentieth century was that “women can have it all,” but after Barrett chose both to have a large family and a prestigious career, her nomination to the Supreme Court generated some claims that she was overburdening herself.
However, shouldn’t her course — which she admitted was costing her sleep while caring for her family, including seven children — be left to her to pursue as long as it was ethically chosen? In introducing Barrett in the Rose Garden on September 26, Trump noted that she would be the first mother with school-age children to serve on the High Court.
In an article posted at Politico Magazine on September 27, pro-life feminist legal scholar Erika Bachiochi noted that the kind of feminism pursued by the recently deceased Justice Ginsburg viewed permissive abortion as a vital tool to achieve equality for women.
Yet, Bachiochi wrote, permissive abortion, rather than freeing women, left them burdened with an inequality that empowered men to abandon the responsibilities they previously had.
“Barrett embodies a new kind of feminism, a feminism that builds upon the praiseworthy antidiscrimination work of Ginsburg but then goes further,” Bachiochi wrote. “It insists not just on the equal rights of men and women, but also on their common responsibilities, particularly in the realm of family life.
“In this new feminism, sexual equality is found not in imitating men’s capacity to walk away from an unexpected pregnancy through abortion, but rather in asking men to meet women at a high standard of mutual responsibility, reciprocity and care,” she wrote.
Barrett’s potential impact on the court quickly generated some different expectations, overseas as well as in the U.S.
The deeply left-wing UK Guardian site huffed: “Donald Trump’s pick for America’s highest court, Amy Coney Barrett, is an ‘ideological fanatic’ who threatens abortion rights, health care, and the environment, activists warned on (September 26), before Trump unveiled his third Supreme Court nominee in the White House Rose Garden.”
Die Welt, in Germany, headlined, “Trump relies on Barrett’s commitment to gun ownership.”
Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung chose to go with, “Trump’s candidate could overturn Obamacare.”
But the London Times made sure to employ the conventional cant as it headlined, “Trump’s court nomination gets supporters hoping for return of abortion wars.”
Somehow, according to this view, if millions of preborn babies are ripped apart and dominant media stay quiet rather than highlight the slaughter, there’s no blood being spilled. But if anyone dare suggest the carnage should cease, that’s war.
Although anyone who paid attention to Trump announcing ACB knew her thinking on abortion, Reagan nearly four full decades ago shamefully soured the first year of his presidency by springing O’Connor on the nation while both he and O’Connor tried to prettify her pro-abortion record that was readily known in her home state of Arizona.
I was here in Phoenix and I watched and wrote about Reagan’s inexplicable and needless stab in the back to pro-lifers who had been led to expect far better.
The immediate question was how the genial new president had even heard of the nationally unknown O’Connor, much less think her deserving of a seat on the court.
She was a “moderate” — that is, liberal — Republican who served as majority leader in the Arizona Senate and then, in 1974, was elected to the Maricopa County Superior Court, where she served until liberal Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt nominated her at the end of 1979 to the Arizona Court of Appeals. From whence Reagan elevated her to fill the seat of retiring Justice Potter Stewart.
O’Connor also was a friend of Planned Parenthood, which was co-founded here by Peggy Goldwater, wife of Sen. Barry Goldwater.

A Dirty Business

As it happened, in the early 1970s I was a youngster on the editorial-page staff of the state’s largest daily paper, The Arizona Republic, which was more conservative back then, when I happened to write an editorial noting in passing that State Sen. O’Connor favored a dangerously permissive abortion bill.
No one at the time would have thought of her going on to the Supreme Court in less than a decade. More than a decade after I wrote it, I learned that my editorial was among the copious evidence presented to try to dissuade Reagan from his course, but he would have none of it.
Did his Arizona political friend Sen. Goldwater tell Reagan that fellow Arizonan O’Connor deserved this favor? Did Goldwater’s Planned Parenthood wife? Did Reagan’s own pro-abortion wife, Nancy? News stories at the time vainly wondered who it was.
Outrage quickly arose here then around the nation, prompting Reagan to note this fact in his diary but to add that O’Connor “declares abortion is personally repugnant to her.”
In fact, O’Connor lied her way onto the High Court, falsely claiming to Reagan’s aides that she didn’t disagree on the abortion issue with Carolyn Gerster, MD, an Arizona neighbor who was active on both the state and national levels as a pro-life leader.
O’Connor and Gerster knew each other at the Paradise Valley Country Club, and their sons were together in Scouting. Gerster told me of her frustration at trying to get the truth through to the unwilling Reagan administration.
Reagan proceeded to claim falsely that he learned an Arizona woman — meaning Gerster — wanted the Supreme Court seat for herself and was jealous that O’Connor was getting it. Talk about power politics being a dirty business!
Gerster already had a full life as a pro-life activist as well as being in a joint medical practice with her husband, Josef, in Scottsdale, and also raising five sons.
The story goes that Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, subsequently asked O’Connor as a justice not to embarrass Reagan over the abortion issue, and she seemed to go along with the request for a time, seeing Roe as being on a “collision course with itself.”
Later, of course, with Reagan gone, she jumped in strongly for permissive abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and also in the 5-4 majority defending partial-birth abortion in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).
Presidents often have faded from the scene while their High Court nominees’ work lives on, as with Reagan. We shall see about Trump.