[Mb-civic] More Politicians for the Court - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

More Politicians for the Court

By Norman Ornstein

Sunday, July 3, 2005; Page B07

The resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor means more than the loss 
of the most visible centrist on the Supreme Court. It also means the 
loss of the only justice who has been an elected politician. Before 
coming to the court in 1981, O'Connor had served in the Arizona Senate 
for five years, including time as majority leader.

Is that sort of experience important? Last year, at a remarkable seminar 
at Yale Law School, a group of former Supreme Court law clerks who 
served a half-century ago discussed the behind-the-scenes story of the 
1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. That decision actually took 
two years to reach. It was unanimous in the end, spanning the full range 
of ideology on the court from William O. Douglas on the left to Felix 
Frankfurter on the right. It could easily have been 5 to 4, given the 
issues at stake, the intensity of views and the breathtaking change the 
decision represented.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/01/AR2005070101820.html
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