You need to lighten up Sandy baby...
Saturday, July 2, 2005 at 10:39PM Those immortal words of John Riggins, spoken to the newly appointed
supreme court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, at a Washington banquet when
he was clearly 3 sheets to the wind and obviously not getting the
response he wanted to his wild and crazy guy personna, pretty clearly
summed up everyone's reaction who ever has met Sandra Day O'Connor in
person.
Living as I have in Arizona for some time now I've had the experience
of seeing her no nonsense, frontier tough personality on a few
occasions. She was a big fan and follower of Barry Goldwater, another
conservative who often frustrated his right wing friends with the
occasional lapse or lean to the middle or left, that would leave them
feeling betrayed, but were really nothing more then Old West pragmatism
and decency being applied where needed. She feels, and Barry often
felt, the most anger for far right elements of the republican party who
lose compassion for the outsider, the forgotten person or someone of
lesser means. Read her last dissent in the Kelo vs New London eminent
domain decision, and her understanding of how the least powerful can be
disenfranchised by the powerful.
"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private
party, but the fall out from this decision will not be random. The
beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate
influence and power in the political process, including large
corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government
now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to
those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse
result. "That alone is a just government, wrote James Madison, "which impartially secures to every man, what is his own."
That is how a truly conservative justice reads things, in my humble
opinion. True to Founders intent, protective of the rights of the
common citizen, equal rights under the law.
The battle for her seat will be vicious and ugly. I'm hope GW pulls another Sandra Day O'Connor out of his hat.
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