Folks are getting all hung up on this. Trust me, you don’t clerk for Scalia and then magically start to drift left. It doesn’t happen.
O’Connor was a state appellate court judge, had not been a clerk at the Supreme Court, and was never in the originalist or textualist camp. Barrett is on record stating that Roe was wrong, that the Obamacare decision was wrong, etc.
Put it this way, she has gone farther on record in an originalist way than Gorsuch on some of these hot-button issues. And Gorsuch turned out fine.
I remember Freepers all worried that Gorsuch would go left because he was an Episcopalian. So far, that has been off the mark.
Didn’t the later often liberal Barry Goldwater press Reagan to appoint his fellow Arizonan, O’Connor?