Alito Could Shift Court on Major Issues

Associated Press ^ | By GINA HOLLAND

[Always Right]

O'Connor had a handful of areas she was right on, but there were more areas where she was consistantly wrong on. Alito will be a huge upgrade.

[George W. Bush]

With pragmatic Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as its pendulum, the court has staked out moderate positions,...

Is this a piece from The Onion?

The real upshot to the piece is that Kennedy is the new swing vote on the Court.

[BibChr]

Yeah, well, whatever.

Thanks to Spineless MacSpectre, we'll have parts of THREE MONTHS to be entertained by every tingling, horror-filled possibility before the real carnival comes to town.

/c8<

[Lumper20]

It is high time we have a strict constitutional conservative judge. I am tired of activists like O'Connor.

[Susannah]

I agree that Alito will be an improvement, though I wish he were replacing John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer instead of Sandra Day O'Connor.

O'Connor was presumed to be an opponent of abortion or someone who would at least favor restrictions. That was the opinion, though, of many on the left who viewed most any candidate selected by a Republican as too far to the right.

She seems to have gone further and further to the left during her time on the Supreme Court. She was one of the majority of the right wing of the court when she ruled to maintain Georgia's laws against sodomy back in 1986.

(1986 case upholding Georgia's laws against sodomy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick
White, Burger, Powell, Rehnquist, O'Connor - majority opinion;
Blackmun, Brennan, Marshall, Stevens - dissenters