Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy has been dismantled

Opinion

Sandra Day O'Connor being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took office in 1981. Exepcted to serve in Supreme Court's conservative wing, she established herself as a free thinker.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

Regardless of your political leanings, this is a time for mourning. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has died.

Ninety-eight percent of Americans — those born before June 24, 2022, the day Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided — lived in O’Connor’s world. No longer. Her legacy as a judicial pioneer, a rational and thoughtful jurist, and, yes, even a champion of the rights of women and minorities, has abruptly been dismantled in just the last 18 months. Even for liberals like me, it is a tragic development.

O’Connor was a darling of the right, and for the most part she did not disappoint. The first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, O’Connor was often described as a “moderate” or “classical” conservative. She emerged as both an independent thinker and the all-important swing vote later in her career. She worked to build consensus on a deeply divided court and to shape opinions in her image of a “more perfect Union.”


Sandra Day O’Connor’s impact on two areas of jurisprudence — abortion and affirmative action — is beyond compare. Publicly, it is well-known that she delivered the critical fifth vote in the landmark 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey that upheld a woman’s right to privacy. But it is what she did behind the scenes in that case that qualifies her as a true champion of civil liberties. She refused to buckle under the pressure of the far-right bloc — all men, mind you — when they were clamoring to overturn Roe v. Wade. She threatened to move farther to the left if the likes of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Byron White continued their crusade to strip women of the constitutional ability to seek an abortion.

She withstood the withering, and quite personal, attack from Scalia, who not so subtly analogized her majority opinion in Casey with that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the horrifically repulsive Dred Scott decision, which determined enslaved Blacks were neither citizens nor had any legal rights. O’Connor, to her credit, was determined to preserve the liberty of those Americans (pregnant women in this case) who do not have an adequate voice in the political process.

The same is true in the constitutional arena of affirmative action. O’Connor was the critical, albeit conservative, voice in allowing institutions of higher education to consider race in admissions. Again, she did her best work behind the scenes. While the court struggled with how to thread the equal protection needle in affirmative action cases, O’Connor left the door open for colleges to continue their affirmative action policies. She argued, in Grutter v. Bollinger, that the longstanding judicial practice of disallowing racial preferences could be overcome if a college sought to diversify its student body with an admissions approach that did not set quotas and where admissions officials read each application individually. Affirmative action strategies, she concluded, were not “fatal” simply because they spotlighted race. Diversity in the classroom was a “compelling state interest.” A majority of jurists on the nation’s highest court agreed.

Sadly, the contemporary high court does not agree. The Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, as well as Dobbs, signal the end of a generational expanse in which O’Connor’s constitutional statecraft ruled the day — a period, I would argue, that was far less polarizing than the one we inhabit now. Indeed, she would find it highly ironic that in case after case the dissenters are all women. She would surely recall those battles she waged with a patriarchal institution. Sandra Day O’Connor’s world is now gone, erased by a Supreme Court that neither embraces her sagacity nor seemingly cares about her legacy.

Read More

Ingrassia Exit Highlights Rare GOP Pushback to Trump’s Personnel Picks

President Donald Trump speaks at a White House press briefing on Jan. 30, 2025.

Credit: Jonah Elkowitz/Medill News Service

Ingrassia Exit Highlights Rare GOP Pushback to Trump’s Personnel Picks

WASHINGTON — Paul Ingrassia withdrew his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel on Tuesday night after facing Republican pushback over past controversial statements.

While Ingrassia joins a growing list of President Donald Trump’s nominees who have withdrawn from consideration, many who have aired controversial beliefs or lack requisite qualifications have still been appointed or are still in the nomination process.

Keep ReadingShow less
A Revolution in Congressional Decision-Making
low light photography of armchairs in front of desk

A Revolution in Congressional Decision-Making

The dysfunction of today’s federal government is not simply the product of political division or individual leaders; it is rooted in the internal rules of Congress itself. The Founders, in one of their few major oversights, granted Congress the authority to make its own procedural rules (Article I, Section 5) without establishing any framework for how it should operate. Over time, this blank check has produced a legislative process built to serve partisan power, not public representation.

The result is a Congress that often rewards obstruction and gridlock over compromise and action. The Founders imagined representatives closely tied to their constituents—one member for every 30,000 to 50,000 citizens. Today, that ratio has ballooned to one for every 765,000 in the House, and in the Senate, each member can represent tens of millions (e.g., California). As the population has grown, representation has become distant and impersonal, while procedural rules have tightened the grip of party leadership. Major issues can no longer reach the floor unless the majority party permits it. The link between citizens and decisions has nearly vanished.

Keep ReadingShow less
Lasting peace requires accepting Israel’s right to exist

US President Donald Trump hailed a "tremendous day for the Middle East" as he and regional leaders signed a declaration on Oct. 13, 2025, meant to cement a ceasefire in Gaza, hours after Israel and Hamas exchanged hostages and prisoners. (TNS)

Lasting peace requires accepting Israel’s right to exist

President Trump took a rhetorical victory lap in front of the Israeli parliament Monday. Ignoring his patented departures from the teleprompter, which violated all sorts of valuable norms, it was a speech Trump deserved to give. The ending of the war — even if it’s just a ceasefire — and the release of Israel’s last living hostages is, by itself, a monumental diplomatic accomplishment, and Trump deserves to take a bow.

Much of Trump’s prepared text was forward-looking, calling for a new “golden age” for the Middle East to mirror the one allegedly unfolding here in America. I’m generally skeptical about “golden ages,” here or abroad, and especially leery about any talk about “everlasting peace” in a region that has known “peace” for only a handful of years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Keep ReadingShow less
A child looks into an empty fridge-freezer in a domestic kitchen.

The Trump administration’s suspension of the USDA’s Household Food Security Report halts decades of hunger data tracking.

Getty Images, Catherine Falls Commercial

Trump Gives Up the Fight Against Hunger

A Vanishing Measure of Hunger

Consider a hunger policy director at a state Department of Social Services studying food insecurity data across the state. For years, she has relied on the USDA’s annual Household Food Security Report to identify where hunger is rising, how many families are skipping meals, and how many children go to bed hungry. Those numbers help her target resources and advocate for stronger programs.

Now there is no new data. The survey has been “suspended for review,” officially to allow for a “methodological reassessment” and cost analysis. Critics say the timing and language suggest political motives. It is one of many federal data programs quietly dropped under a Trump executive order on so-called “nonessential statistics,” a phrase that almost parodies itself. Labeling hunger data “nonessential” is like turning off a fire alarm because it makes too much noise; it implies that acknowledging food insecurity is optional and reveals more about the administration’s priorities than reality.

Keep ReadingShow less