Missed Opportunities: Justice David Souter Retires

The retirement of Associate Justice David Souter from the U.S. Supreme Court represents the same thing as did his appointment 20 years ago: another missed opportunity to overturn Roe and return American jurisprudence to some semblance of sanity.

President George H.W. Bush missed out on the opportunity to shape the direction of the Court for a generation by his "stealth" nomination of the little-known Souter (upon the recommendation of pro-abort Sen. Warren Rudman of Souter's home state of New Hampshire). It was a nomination Bush and conservatives would later come to regret, as Souter turned out to be one of the most consistently liberal Justices on the Court over the last 2 decades.

(DO NOT fall for the media descriptions of Souter as part of a "moderate" bloc on the Court; I can't think of a single major constitutional decision in which Souter could be claimed to have come down on the "conservative" side, surely something a "moderate" would have done at least on occasion, as O'Connor and Kennedy often did.)

And now, with Souter's retirement, pro-lifers and constitutional conservatives have missed out on yet another opportunity to shape the Court, as a newly elected President hostile to our interests will get - a mere few months into his term - what will surely be the first of at least 2 or 3 Supreme Court vacancies that he will have the opportunity to fill (look for Stevens and Ginsburg to go at some point) in the next 3-and-a-half years.