Word: souter
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...week wore on and Souter came to life, he was transmuted from a dazed and gray-faced gnome standing awkwardly beside the tall and tanned Bush into a Yankee original in the mold of astronauts Alan Shepard and Christa McAuliffe and the last Supreme Court Justice to hail from the Granite State, Harlan Fiske Stone. By choosing someone so hard to pigeonhole, indeed, someone from another era, Bush may have created the kind of philosophical gridlock he felt he needed to get his nominee swiftly approved. If Americans are lucky, they will also get the kind of Justice they need...
...Justice less inclined to overturn Roe, right-to- life activists and conservative Republicans already angered by Bush's retraction of his "no new taxes" pledge would be enraged. Facing these polarized options, the President deftly reduced the risk by selecting a Stealth candidate. Federal Appeals Court Judge David Souter, the President's choice for the court, has said and written so little about major constitutional issues that it is almost impossible to determine how he might rule on them...
Bush is gambling that the liberal coalition that launched the fight against Bork will be stymied by a paradox: nothing could be more difficult than to draw battle lines on a blank slate. While there is ample evidence of the quality of Souter's intellect -- magna cum laude Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, Harvard law -- most of his judicial experience has been on New Hampshire's state supreme court, which is more likely to consider auto- insurance cases and commercial litigation than divisive social issues like abortion and affirmative action. Elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston only last...
Unable to get a fix on Souter from that sparse record, activists from both sides of the political spectrum began combing through what little was known about his personal life in search of evidence to either calm their fears or justify their suspicions. Some wondered if the 50-year-old lifelong bachelor might be gay. (Friends assured them he is not.) Others speculated that Souter's streak of Yankee independence would make him a less than reliable vote for either side of the abortion issue. In a rambling television interview last week, Justice Thurgood Marshall, a last vestige...
...Court Judge Edith Jones of Texas, a law-and-order advocate who was the President's second choice. But they take comfort from the fact that Bush's pick has the strong backing of White House chief of staff John Sununu, a former Governor of New Hampshire who appointed Souter to the state supreme court in 1983. Says one senior Republican: "There's been a lot of wink-wink, nod-nod among conservatives who think Souter is Sununu's guy and therefore can be trusted...