First: Sandra Day O'Connor

by Evan Thomas

Confident but humble, and a born politician, she effectively controlled the Court because she was a moderate who believed in compromise.

Aside from the cattle, the animals that mattered most were the horses. The cowboys gave them colorful names: Hysterectomy (“a great horse. She would carry a cowboy all day,” Sandra remembered), Scarhead, Swastika, Idiot, Hemorrhoid (“After riding him all day, you felt tired and bruised”), and Hell Bitch, who turned out to be a gentle horse, once broken.

Influenced by Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 antisocialist manifesto, The Road to Serfdom, he developed a strong libertarian streak—and saw the American West as its natural expression. Earning a B.A. at Stanford on the GI Bill, he spent a year at Harvard, studying politics and reinforcing his suspicion of East Coast know-it-alls and dislike of northern winters. The professors, he believed, were “liberal blatherers” who condescended to the rubes from the provinces.31

Yet he took govt aid *eye roll*

Beatsie could see that John equally appreciated Sandra’s natural gifts, but did not confuse the issue by feeling a need to show off his male superiority.

In interviews almost a half century after the failure of the ERA, Lubin and Odegaard revisited their complaints against O’Connor. “She was not the kind of person to sit around and do nothing, but all of a sudden she got very quiet,” said Lubin. “She never asked a question at hearings. She sat there like a piece of deadwood. I don’t think Sandra was sincere on this issue. I think she was looking for a federal judgeship.” Odegaard likewise claimed, without proof, that Senator O’Connor sold out the pro-ERA forces for her own advancement.35

“I’m not sure the Equal Rights Amendment is necessary. I am inclined to believe that a few well-chosen cases brought before the federal courts would establish the equality of women under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act, in a meaningful way.”

And then maga cult would destroy it

Irene Lyons Rasmussen, one of the ERA activists who felt that O’Connor had put her own career ahead of the ERA in 1971, had a more forgiving view when, some years later, she brought her daughter to visit the chambers of the first woman justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice O’Connor gave them the grand tour, she recalled, and invited them to lunch in her chambers.72

To be a self-aware Arizonan was to live with an anomaly. The state was dependent on the federal government for its prosperity, even its survival. The vast water projects greening the desert and populating the Phoenix suburbs were paid for largely by the American taxpayer, via the lawmakers and regulators in Washington. Being human, the people who lived in Arizona, as well as other western states, often felt more hostility than gratitude for this largesse, which of course came with strings attached. They denounced Big Government as they drove down interstate highways. They waxed nostalgic about the Wild West even though the federal government owned much of it, including most of the land grazed upon by Harry Day’s cattle.