While only one acknowledged war criminal died this week, Henry Kissinger impacted Americans to a rather minor extent compared to the consequences of the career of the most recent dead Republican.
Ignore 99% of her decisions, opinions, & any mealy-mouthed consensus building efforts.
Ignore the whole “first woman on SCOTUS” factoid.
Ignore her admittedly often even-handed jurisprudence, irritating supporters & detractors alike.
Sometimes, only one vote matters.
In the case of fellow Arizonan John McCain, one thumbs-down vote helped redeem the legacy of what he tried to unleash on this country with the least qualified VP nominee ever.
In another, one thumbs-up to support a fellow Republican sentenced untold unborn millions to incomprehensible future suffering, not to mention plenty of problems over the last 20 years for everyone already here.
Let’s review what Sandra Day O’Connor selfishly wrought:
- The ravages of 23 years of nearly unchecked global warming, with all the worst of climate change only now bearing down on humanity;
- The economic devastation of the Great Recession;
- The hundreds of thousands of innocents & 4,431 American fatalities in the Iraq War;
- The War in Afghanistan, justifiable to end Al Qaeda but still a tableau of horrors, including the deaths of 2,402 members of the US military;
- The War on Terror, which ended any semblance of American moral superiority when REPUBLICANS BEGAN SYSTEMATICALLY TORTURING FOREIGN TERRORISTS & AMERICAN CITIZENS ALIKE and enabled a surveillance state that only laid the foundation for future deep fakes, AI, & thoughtcrime;
- 9/11, permitted by a purportedly conservative administration – just like what just happened on 10/7 in Israel – caught looking the wrong way & dropping the biggest ball in American history, including the immediate deaths of 2,977; &
- Justice Samuel Alito, her successor, author of the precedent-shredding Dobbs decision & two decades of case law that almost always prioritizes the powerful over the poor, the privileged over the afflicted, & the past over the future.
On a day when the US political apparatus expelled one fraud yet began the final lionization of another, let’s never forget the devastating costs of one solitary vote cast by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, arguably the third-most influential justice in US history (after John Marshall and probably Earl Warren).
One vote she didn’t even need to make.
Let’s be honest.
Al Gore would have won Florida by 100K votes if he’d chosen former Florida Governor & then-Senator Bob Graham - just re-elected in 1998 by 1M(!) votes over Charlie Crist - as his Vice-Presidential nominee, instead of future Dem turncoat Joe Lieberman. Though a little quirky, Graham boasted impeccable traditional qualifications, and while not an inspired pick, would have gotten Gore elected.
Gore’s electioneering errors can’t be ignored.
However, by all reasonable calculations of completed votes, despite that act of political malpractice, Gore still received the most votes in Florida, meaning that he WON Florida, the 2000 election, and the White House. Only a circumvented ballot counting process, halted by the 5-4 SCOTUS Bush v Gore decision, changed history.
Did lawyers on both sides make mistakes?
Should the Gore team, in particular, have taken the democratic high road of trying to recount EVERY vote - in every county, red and blue - rather than highlighting Dem-leaning counties?
Did some badly-designed butterfly ballots swing the perception of the election, both on the ground & on TV?
Could a SCOTUS majority, elevating facts above politics, still have FIXED ALL THAT BY JUST SAYING “COUNT EVERY BALLOT?”
Could the decision also simply have been left to the duly-chosen Justices of the Florida Supreme Court, in what had always traditionally been a state-level decision?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, & yes: a recusal, and a 4-4 decision, would have let the state court decision stand.
Yet who cast that fatal vote, a literal thumbs up but a Caesarian thumbs down for 9,810 Americans & countless thousands of Iraqis & Afghans, which allowed all those aforementioned atrocities authored from the Bush 43 West Wing?
One wanting-to-retire Supreme Court Associate Justice, visibly distraught on election eve when the networks first called the Presidency for Gore, all because she and her husband couldn’t return to Arizona, since she didn’t want a Democrat to pick her successor.
All she had to do was recuse herself.
By attending a publicized election party & openly rooting against the chances of a candidate with pressing business before SCOTUS, she placed herself in an unconscionable position, one she could have exited if she simply said “I recuse.”
She didn’t.
Despite the clear conflict, she seized her chance, and she voted.
Justice O’Connor smashed down her thumb on the scales of justice, and she slammed so hard that Lady Justice dropped them altogether, in a cacophonous clattering echoing forward through history yet unwritten.
EVERY glass ceiling NEEDS shattering, preferably as soon as possible. Yet when even liberal stalwarts salute her groundbreaking career, we must never forget that, on the rarest occasion, the wrong woman at the wrong time instead opens Pandora’s Box.
Now, O’Connor gets buried in Arizona - where she should have stayed, especially given her two meager years as an Arizona appellate judge - but deserves to rest uncomfortably in a Sandra Day O’Connor Memorial Cemetery in Baghdad.
Or Kabul.
Or Gitmo.
Maybe just call them the Sandra Day O’Connor Memorial Reflecting Pools in the shadow of One World Trade Center?
Or maybe, just maybe, Arizona makes sense, as one of so many places at high risk of running out of water due to global warming’s effects and losing all its population and visitors, all largely thanks to the industry-approving & environment-ignoring “principles” of O’Connor’s fellow Republicans.
Let her lie somewhere where, thanks to the policies of politicians she supported, her tomb only will be visited in future centuries by the same rats & snakes that enabled her ridiculous rise in the first place.
What an utter waste of a career and life, condemning so many to consequences that no one ever forced her to face.
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.