What has attracted Whelan’s ire? He doesn’t seem to like the way that O’Connor has ruled on some of the cases she has sat on by designation, most notably the decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit case, Gonzalez v. State of Arizona, 08-17094, in which O’Connor sided with one other judge (over a dissent by the Circuit’s chief judge) to hold that an Arizona statute that requires voters to show proof of citizenship at the poll is pre-empted by the National Voter Registration Act. Whatever you may think of the decision in the case, the answer is not to call for a judge who decided it to resign. That is the kind of intemperate call we hear from time to time when the left does not like an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, or Justice Antonin Scalia, or — you get the picture.
O’Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, was nominated by Ronald Reagan, and served on the Court for 25 years before her 2005 retirement. Like most other judges on so-called “senior status” she is required by an Act of Congress to carry a partial caseload in order to qualify for certain retirement compensation and benefits. But the lighter caseload also means that she has time to work on other matters that she cares about-in O’Connor’s case the problem that costly, nasty state court judicial election races have created for the administration of justice, and the need for better civic education of our young people.
