One Democrat was out of town the day of the vote.

21, 1981, Biden was a vote to confirm, one of 45 Democrats and 54 Republicans. “If there is one aspect of this nomination that concerns me - and I must acknowledge it does not concern me very much at this point - it is your lack of extensive constitutional experience,” Biden said.īut when the Senate held its final vote on Sept. Some Democrats also raised mild concerns about O’Connor, including Biden, then the junior senator from Delaware. She would go on to be one of three authors of the 1992 decision that reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose, although the court also strengthened states’ ability to regulate abortion. for not saying how she would vote as a member of the Supreme Court on abortion because she would disqualify herself from voting on that question if it does come before the Supreme Court again,” Thurmond said.Īs it turned out, the anti-abortion opposition to O’Connor was not unfounded. But he said O’Connor was constrained in what she could say about it because the issue was certain to come before the court again. Wade, which guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion. Strom Thurmond, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made clear his distaste for the high court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Senate Republicans largely followed suit, even if some privately expressed their doubts to Reagan. “President Reagan already had put himself on the line with the nominee,” Biskupic wrote in “Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice.” And with the president having made his choice, the White House had little interest in probing too deeply on the subject of abortion, as the author Joan Biskupic noted in her biography of O’Connor. Public opinion polls, though, found deep support for the nomination. Anti-abortion groups rose up in alarm, complaining that Reagan was going back on the Republican platform promise to appoint judges who respect “the sanctity of innocent human life.”įather Charles Fiore, an anti-abortion leader who testified at O’Connor’s hearing, said Reagan’s choice of O’Connor elicited “virtually unanimous disappointment on the part of rank-and-file right-to-lifers” because it was at odds with the party platform and Reagan’s appeal to white Democrats who were so important to his victory.

What little opposition there was to O’Connor, then a little-known Arizona judge, was over her record on abortion when she had earlier served in the Arizona Senate. Police shooting outside Sioux Falls restaurant leaves 1 dead

Sandra day o connor federal courthouse