To me, she was always Mrs. O’Connor, the mom next door. Yet she was always—even then, in the mid-1960s in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona—the person who would be Justice O’Connor. Long before her breakthrough appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court made her one of America’s most renowned jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor showed the qualities of pragmatism, wisdom, and patience with human frailty that marked her time on the Court—and make her legacy more precious than ever today.

When I was 6, my family moved into a brand-new house in Phoenix. Before the construction was finished, I encountered a boy my age playing amid the studs, wires, and boxes of nails. (Boys could do such things back then.) One of the three O’Connor boys, he turned out to be a neighbor. Because we went to school together down the street, I found myself often going in and out of the O’Connors’ house, a low-slung desert rambler, built distinctively with adobe bricks. I still recall the pitch and inflection of Mrs. O’Connor’s greeting: “Well, hello, Jon Rauch!”

Mrs. O’Connor did not put on airs. For me, the highlight of every year was Halloween at the O’Connors’ place, which they converted into a multiroom haunted house. Cackling wickedly and stirring a bubbling cauldron of dry ice, Mrs. O’Connor dressed up as a black-caped, pointy-hatted witch, while her husband, John, lumbered around with a monster mask on his face and a plastic knife through his neck.

Yet I soon became aware that the mom next door was a formidable personage. She seemed to be involved in every kind of community activity. My father, himself a lawyer, told me that Mrs. O’Connor was a hard-driving, brilliant, and omnisciently prepared attorney. He related how, when she was an assistant state attorney general and he was representing a welfare claimant, he’d experienced every litigator’s worst nightmare: In open court, she’d uncorked an authoritative statute he had never heard of. (He lost.) No one was surprised when she was appointed to the state Senate and rose to be its first—and the nation’s first—female majority leader. Following that, she was appointed a judge on Arizona’s Court of Appeals.

Phoenix in the ’60s and ’70s was a conservative, solidly Republican state—home to Barry Goldwater, the fiercely anti-communist, anti-union U.S. senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate. (His hilltop house was within sight of my neighborhood.) For the most part, though, Arizona’s brand of Republican was buttoned-down and businesslike. William Rehnquist, the future U.S. chief justice and another Phoenix Republican fixture in those days, was considered far-right. Sandra Day O’Connor embodied the party’s center: conservative but pragmatic, oriented toward solving problems rather than creating or amplifying them.

The same no-nonsense, get-it-done attitude that made her a person who befitted any boardroom or community group made her the kind of legislator and judge around whom people gathered and for whom things happened. You knew you could rely on Mrs. O’Connor to be the grown-up in the room.

That persona traveled with her to the country’s highest court. In 1981, when Potter Stewart’s seat opened and President Ronald Reagan pledged to fill it with a woman, I told friends that I knew the perfect person—but that the president would never pick her, because she was too little known and insufficiently ideological for the party’s already fiercely conservative right. But Goldwater, of all people, went to bat for her. So began a Supreme Court career that, to this day, remains underappreciated.

Justice O’Connor’s jurisprudence flummoxed and annoyed legal scholars. She had no overarching judicial philosophy, unlike conservatives such as the combative originalist Antonin Scalia, the purist libertarian Clarence Thomas, or the committed textualist Neil Gorsuch. Her opinions could be murky and temporizing. She was conservative, no doubt about that, but she was also a justice who had previously been a working politician, and it showed in her holdings: She looked for solutions and, more important, for ways to ensure that regular people could look for solutions. She understood the Court’s role as political—not in the activist sense of legislating from the bench, but in the realist sense of seeing the Court as embedded in a political matrix where rigid doctrine could do more harm than good. Known for years as the Court’s swing vote—for a while, some called it the O’Connor Court—she was also, on many occasions, its anchor to reality.

It was like her to rule, in Grutter v. Bollinger, that affirmative action could continue in university admissions—but only for a while, not forever. It was like her, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to trim but not eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion. Her difference-splitting holdings infuriated constitutional purists on both sides, but she followed a higher kind of constitutionalism: a recognition that not every issue is ripe to be decided judicially.

Sometimes, like the mom she was, she needed to tell the kids to go back and try harder. Ambiguity and compromise, she saw, could be vital aspects of Supreme Court jurisprudence. If academics and ideologues disapproved, so much the worse for them.

That the lack of an O’Connor on today’s Supreme Court has become a costly deficit goes almost without saying. The Court is often criticized for being too political, but Justice O’Connor’s virtue was that, having been a politician, she had an innate feel for consensus and consent. Today, all nine justices were appointed from U.S. appellate courts or legal academia. None has run for or held elective office. The result has been the kind of sweeping, ideologically inflected jurisprudence that Justice O’Connor avoided. She is rightly remembered as the Court’s first woman; she should also be remembered, alas, as its last politician.

In adulthood, I mostly lost touch with Mrs. O’Connor. Still, with time, I only grew in my appreciation of her qualities. They have become lamentably scarce in American public life and especially in the Republican Party, which owed her so much and yet became so hostile to her legacy. After she retired from the Court, I was surprised when she took up the cause of civics education. Wasn’t this too marginal and small-bore a cause for a person of her stature? Now I understand that, as usual, she was practical and prescient.

Back in August 1981, when she was in Phoenix awaiting confirmation, I made the familiar backyard trek for a hello visit. Despite her sudden elevation to global fame, there she was, the same Mrs. O’Connor, breading fish filets in the kitchen.

Twenty-four years later, in 2005, she received my father and me in her Supreme Court chambers. At that point, she had submitted her resignation from the Court, but the recent death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist delayed her departure (which would not occur until the following year). She expressed frustration, because her husband’s increasing dementia needed her full attention. She was still the problem-solver, the responsibility-taker, the adult in the room—and she was needed elsewhere.

More than ever, her spirit is needed here, today.

This morning, Republican Representative George Santos became the sixth House member in American history to be expelled from Congress. Though Santos managed to hang on to the support of the majority in his party, he was ousted in a 311–114 vote. I spoke with my colleague Russell Berman, who covers politics, about why some members voted not to expel Santos, and how much of an outlier he really is.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inflation is your fault. Ron DeSantis debates his grievances. Expelling George Santos was a mistake.

Republicans find their line

Lora Kelley: How did we get to a place where Santos is being expelled, and how did he make it to Congress in the first place?

Russell Berman: George Santos ran in what should have been a high-profile, competitive race last year in Long Island. He was in a swing district that was fiercely contested because control of the House was on the line. And yet, he basically snuck into Congress without the scrutiny that comes with being a candidate in a competitive race. It was only a few weeks after his election that The New York Times reported that he’d basically lied about his entire résumé: He’d lied about getting degrees from Baruch College and New York University. He’d lied about working on Wall Street for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He’d even allegedly lied about having grandparents who’d fled Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, and he claimed that his mother was in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

When Santos arrived in Congress, in January, Republicans had a very thin majority. Kevin McCarthy needed Santos’s vote to become speaker, so he was unwilling to sanction him. Instead, he sent the issue to the House Ethics Committee, which spent months investigating Santos.

It turned out, his lies about his résumé were only the tip of the iceberg. According to the indictment that was filed in federal court, he used made-up loans and contributors’ credit-card information to inflate his campaign. The Ethics Committee also alleged that he’d exploited his congressional funding to benefit himself financially, spending money on things like OnlyFans and Botox. (Santos has generally denied the allegations and called the report a “smear,” but he has refused to address them specifically.) For many Republicans, the report was the last straw.

Lora: Santos has faced two previous expulsion attempts. Why did those votes fail while today’s passed?

Russell: Before Santos, the House had expelled only five members in its history. Those representatives were either members of the Confederacy during the Civil War or had been convicted of crimes in court. Santos has been accused of crimes, but he has so far not been convicted.

Politicians are sensitive to having their career upended based solely on accusations of wrongdoing. Before this ethics report came out, dozens of Democrats opposed Santos’s expulsion. They did not want to set this precedent that damning accusations were enough to expel somebody. A couple of Democrats ended up voting against expelling him today, and two voted present.

Many Republicans, similarly, said they were worried about precedent. That was the official reason for backing him, but it was, of course, wrapped up in congressional politics, as so many of these things are. The new speaker, Mike Johnson, along with basically the entire Republican leadership and the majority of Republican representatives, voted against expelling Santos. They still have a very narrow majority. Now there’s going to be a special election for Santos’s seat, and it’s certainly possible that a Democrat could replace him.

Lora: Did the fact that his alleged crimes were so brazen affect the calculus about voting him out?

Russell: Certainly, Republicans wanted to get rid of the headache and the drama. But Republicans have made plenty of drama on their own. So it’s hard to say that, by getting rid of this allegedly corrupt member, all of a sudden they’re going to have a smoothly functioning, business-oriented House of Representatives.

Santos had already announced that he’s not running for reelection, which, for some members, might have been a reason not to expel him. But for other members, the thinking was likely: If he’s not running, we might as well lance the boil now. There’s been such a circus atmosphere around him.

Lora: To what extent do you see him as representative of the Republican Party at this moment, versus a true outlier?

Russell: We’ve seen all of these performative, not very substantive members of Congress lately: Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. Some of them seem to prioritize gaining followers on social media and getting on Fox News over passing bills. They don’t actually want to be legislators; they want to be political celebrities. In that sense, Santos was not unique.

But in the sheer breadth of his deception and lies, he was. We’ve seen corrupt members of Congress: people who have used campaign accounts for personal benefit, who have taken bribes. That’s as old as politics. But what we haven’t seen until now is someone who created their life story out of whole cloth.

Lora: What, if anything, will this change for Republicans?

Russell: I don’t think this changes much. The Republican Party was not even close to unanimous on this vote. Remember, at the same time that they’re holding Santos accountable, they are largely rallying around Donald Trump, who has been indicted in four different criminal cases, who is known to lie, and who has had all kinds of ethical lapses over the course of the past several years. I don’t think this is going to set any new precedent on the part of the Republican Party.

Related:

George Santos was finally too much for Republicans. Expelling George Santos was a mistake.

Today’s News

The Israel-Hamas war has resumed after a seven-day truce. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, has died at the age of 93.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: ChatGPT is celebrating its first birthday, Matteo Wong writes. For the past year, our brains have been trapped in its world. The Books Briefing: Anthony Tommasini, the former chief classical-music critic for The New York Times, recommends books and music in conversation with Gal Beckerman. Weekly Planet: Something big just happened at COP, Zoë Schlanger reports. Work in Progress: Persistent employment misery is a myth, Derek Thompson writes. What if Americans are happy at work?

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Evening Read

Stephen Voss / Redux

What Kissinger Didn’t Understand

By George Packer

Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.

Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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