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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.