PDF of O'Connor resignation letter
If Mr. Bush wants to name a Hispanic to the Court -- and he has good political reasons for doing so -- how about Emilio Garza? Judge Garza now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and is a reliable conservative. Read more about him and other potential nominees in this piece from Slate.
UPDATE (I): Pace my musing below, is the resignation of the Chief Justice also imminent?
UPDATE (II): Question of the hour: is President Bush politically homicidal, i.e. does he wish to kill off the Republican Party? If he nominates Alberto Gonzales, the answer is yes. GOP activists would, in my view, accept Judge Gonzales as a replacement for Justice John Paul Stevens, the most likely retirement among the Court's liberals. But they will not accept Gonzales as a replacement for O'Connor, a swing vote, or for Rehnquist, a conservative.
UPDATE (III) -- My partisan brethren at Blogs for Bush are mathematically challenged. This part is right:
It's all about Roe, my friends - the Planned Parenthood release and the statements by Dodd and Kennedy I just watched on Fox all tell me that the pro-abortion lobby has put its foot down and is demanding a tooth-and-nail defense of Roe by the Democrats.
Yes. A constitutional right to scrape out the uterus is the Holy Grail of Democratic politics.
But this part is not right:
Roe wont be mentioned much, but the pro-abort fear is that O'Connor's replacement will provide that fifth Supreme Court vote against it...keep that in mind ...
Actually, what we should keep in mind is that 3 + 1 = 4, not 5. Replacing Justice O'Connor with a constitutionalist will not produce 5 votes for overturning Roe. The Court most recently expressed its affirmation of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), in an opinion authored in part by Justice O'Connor, an appointee of Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan's second appointee, Justice Anthony Kennedy, was one of two other authors. So while the composition of the Court has changed since 1992, we can still count 5 votes for affirming Roe even with Justice O'Connor gone:
Is the gang at Blogs for Bush counting on Ginsburg or Breyer, neither of whom was on the Court when Casey was decided, as a vote to overrule Roe? (Hello!?, Hello!?) If not, then there aren't 5 votes for doing so, even with a conservative replacement for O'Connor.