Originally posted by Big BadI wasn't able to find an answer to this after an exhaustive search of Wikipedia, but is O'Connor allowed to revoke her resignation?
The question with O'Connor is if this somehow drags out past this term, and with a President with seemingly very little political capital that is possible, does she continue to stay on or does the court go with 8? The only reason 9 has become the magic number for Supreme Court Justices is because that's how many seats they built when they moved the Court from the basement of the Senate to the Supreme Court Building. Many nominees have gone down before. However, can anyone actually remember a Supreme Court nominee being torpedoed by the President's own party while his party controlled the Senate? Qualified or unqualified, the Republicans don't block her if Bush is polling high 50's-low 60's rather than mid-high 30's.
Originally posted by Big BadI wasn't able to find an answer to this after an exhaustive search of Wikipedia, but is O'Connor allowed to revoke her resignation?
O'Connor made her resignation contingent on a replacement nomination being confirmed. She would like it sooner rather than later as she wants to spend time with her ill husband.
I enjoyed the comment from Ed Helms on the Daily Show last night, that the White House is not treating this as a setback, but an achievement. They finally have gotten both Democrats and Republicans to agree on something.
Jon Stewart also had a good comment that her withdrawl of her nomination was the first and only document she provided to the Senate judiciary committee.
I'm not sure I'd so easily dismiss her claims about handing over the White House Counsel documents being the sticky issue. I believe she was the counsel who skillfully changed the focus on Dubya's lack of national guard service to Dan Rather's forging memos about said National Guard service. If there are any documents about those discussion and they came out, it'd be a huge setback to the Republican party. I know there are a lot of ifs here and I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I'm of the generation that used to trust politicians, and now believe in supporting NOTA - None of the Above.
I would say one area sure to be relevant to your paper would be immigration trends in Europe, particularly regarding refugees from Africa (thinking France and the Algerian problem) and the Middle East.