Risky
by digby
Evidently it is now considered "risky" for Obama to appoint someone to the Supreme Court who is pro-choice:
Of the three names most talked about as possible replacements for retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens — Solicitor General Elena Kagan, D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland and Seventh Circuit Diane Wood — Judge Wood is often viewed as being the riskiest choice.
By all accounts, Judge Wood is supremely qualified, writes Nathan Koppel in Thursday’s WSJ. She even garners some hedged support from conservatives. “Her opinions are all very scholarly” said American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Greve. “She is not a bleeding heart.”
The reason she’s viewed by many as a riskier pick than the others: she’s been relatively outspoken in her support of abortion rights.
Koppel writes that Judge Wood has expressed approval for the philosophy behind the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a woman’s right to abortion, which was written by her former boss, Justice Harry Blackmun.
In 1993, Judge Wood praised Justice Blackmun, for whom she had clerked in the mid-1970s. “Justice Blackmun articulated in Roe …the important insight that a core set of individual rights exists that neither the states nor the federal government may trample,” she wrote in the Dickinson Law Review...
Supporters say Judge Wood’s record shows she would be a strong voice for women’s rights—something President Obama said last week he wants.
But it’s a position that’s unlikely to sit too well with many conservative senators.
“There is no appellate judge in the U.S. who has a more extreme record on abortion than Diane Wood,” said the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan.
So Roe Vs Wade is now an extreme position. Not that I'm surprised. States are requiring forced vaginal ultrasound probes so that the human vessels which pretend to be corporations and exert rights as persons can be shamed into fulfilling their bodily imperative --- Roe is rather extreme by those lights. Allowing walking gestation chambers to have any say at all is tantamount to murder.
I'm guessing the administration will anoint someone who has no record on anything so that these conservative senators might have a blank canvas on which to project the liberal menace. That way Lindsay Graham gets to insult and degrade this person to his or her face and then reluctantly vote to confirm in the end. It's the way it's done these days.
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