Rudman remembers when fears about David Souter's leanings were assuaged by his vote on Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.
"At first, I didn't see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform," Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. "Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying."
An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: "You were right about him [Souter]! ... You were right!"
The two men were so jubilant, so giddy--practically dancing--that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: "[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings."
It was sheer bliss: Roe v. Wade had been saved; it was alive. The two senators, liberal Democrat and liberal Republican, were so overcome that they sobbed. It was the most joyous moment.
Thanks to David Souter, Rudman celebrated: "The combined efforts of the Reagan and Bush administrations and the religious right to overthrow Roe had been defeated, probably for good."
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Awakaman,
You should read some history. The Republican Party was pro-contraception and incipiently pro-Abortion before Roe v. Wade. The blue-blood WASPs were pro-contraception and pro-abortion. Gerald Ford still represented that tradition of Republicans. RvW galvanized things and changed the whole landscape of politics in the USA. Reagan lost his first effort against Ford but won in 1980 with the help of Reagan Democrats, Catholics. Through hard slogging grassroots political organizing work they capture enough of the party to change it. The blue-blood, anti-life WASP Republicans have never forgiven them and are to this day trying to read them out of the party.
But in the meantime the Democrats did banish absolutely all pro-life national candidates. Period. They are now the Party of Death pure and simple. Where so-called pro-life Democrat wins below the national level, once in the Senate (Bob Casey, Jr.) he toes the party anti-life line, with a few sops to the Catholic dupes who voted him in. At present the Republican internecine war over life and death goes on. We all wish Bush I and II would have done more but at least they did something (Alito, Roberts, conscience clause, vetos of FOCA etc.) As leaders of a party divided on the issue, they've delivered hit and miss.
But the Democrats have never missed an opportunity to push their thumbs in the eyes of pro-life voters. Period. Perhaps that will change. I'd welcome it if it did. But so far I see no signs whatsoever of it happening. Wake me up when it does.
Bush I and Reagen were at least partially deceived on Souter, O'Connor, Kennedy etc. Your references to Burger and Blackmun are ludicrous--they were Republican appointments long before RvW galvanized the issue. You toss them in as if they mattered--cheap rhetorical shots.
Even congenitally Democrat-inclined Catholic bishops are finally realizing this reality: the Democrats are at present purely a party of death, a party that has declared war on the Catholic church in terms of eiminating the conscience clauses and forcing the homosexual agenda on the nation.
Perhaps it will change. Those who wish may want to work to win back the Democrat party. But transforming something requires as a first step being clear-eyed about the present situation. And your attempt to do the old Tu Quoque Two Step is lame.
O'Connor was a pure mistake on Reagan's part. He promised to appoint a woman during the 1980 campaign, and he picked a promising-seeming woman without really looking into her true views. Kennedy was different. Reagan tried to appoint Bork (who surely would have voted to overturn Roe), then tried to appoint Douglas Ginsburg (I don't know how he would have voted), then finally appointed Kennedy. We now know (since Harry Blackmun's private notes were released) that Kennedy (unlike O'Connor or Souter) originally voted to overturn Roe in 1992, but caved under the pressure of making such a momentous change in history and switched. Should Reagan have foreseen that? I don't know, but it's at least an ambiguous case.
Amy, thank you for posting this account. I will print it and give it to Her Honor when she returns from the Fifth Circuit Judicial Conference tomorrow. As the losing candidate at the time, she will, I assume, be interested in this account.
Wow! This blog is read by movers and shakers (or spouses thereof). I've seen Mr. Jones's name before but never knew his connections. (His name is Jones, after all!)
Houghton:
Again, I say:
In appointing these men [and woman] Bush and Reagan got what they wanted (and every modern president wants) a yes man on the Supreme Court, but not a yes man on the subject of abortion rather a yes man concerning the supremacy of the federal government over the states (that was the fundamental issue in Roe)and someone who would uphold strong presidental powers.
You can point all the articles they may have written and all the speaches they may have given which had lots of rhetoric supporting life, smaller government and other social conservative issues. But face it it was all rhetoric . . . there was never any action. At the end of the day when the Reagan and the Bush's left office the federal government was much bigger than it was before they entered office, the Presidency was more powerful, and the states and local governments were more constrained.
Again, Roe is more than an abortion case. Pre-Roe abortion was a state law issue, but Roe federalized the issue. Presidents with the consent of congress have been appointing justices with one primary viewpoint - expanding the power of the federal government and the presidency at the expense of local and state governments.