By Kirk Petersen
She was a particularly Episcopalian Supreme Court justice.
Sandra Day O’Connor, who died December 1 at the age of 93, was a cradle Episcopalian. As a justice, she was a walking embodiment of via media. She considered church governance to be a ministry, serving for eight years in the early 1990s on the Cathedral Chapter of the Washington National Cathedral.
She was “someone who wore her celebrity lightly,” said Nathan Baxter, who grew close to O’Connor when he was dean of the cathedral and she was on the governing body. Baxter later served as the 10th Bishop of Central Pennsylvania, retiring in 2014 after eight years in that role. “I mean, she could be very clear that she had a viewpoint, but she was very gracious.”
Baxter shared story after story with TLC, and said the justice “often talked about the role of the cathedral spiritually for the nation.”
Baxter’s first major funeral as dean of the cathedral was for Thurgood Marshall, another Episcopal justice, who died in 1993. “Sandra Day O’Connor was sitting with my wife, and they were both very nervous because after all of these eulogies — some of which bordered on sermons — they were nervous about this new young dean, how was he going to cope with this.” His wife “tells about [the justice] squeezing Mary Ellen’s hand, when I got up to go to the pulpit, and she said, I felt like she was praying with me for you.”
O’Connor was a regular presence in the pews, first at the 9 o’clock service along with Justice David Souter (another Episcopalian), and in later years at the 11 o’clock. “She was very faithful,” Baxter said.
When the cathedral had to make a high-profile personnel decision, it sparked considerable controversy and led to “a huge news conference,” Baxter said. Along with then-Bishop of Washington Ronald Haines, “Sandra Day O’Connor sat with me and a couple of staff members, and helped us to think our way through how we should communicate to the media on this controversial matter. And they gave me a lot of courage. Of course, they didn’t come downstairs and go to the media, they went out the back way,” he said with a laugh. “But they were a blessing, they were very much a blessing to help me think through and how to stay on message, but be empathetic with regard to those who were not pleased with the ultimate decision.”
“I tend to lean more towards the progressive side of issues,” Baxter said, while O’Connor did not. “One of the things she helped me to understand is how necessary the conservative perspective is, when we are dealing with important political and cultural and social issues,” he said. She helped him consider, “while we work towards what we consider to be progress, what is there that we cherish that needs to be conserved and considered?”
O’Connor formed a close friendship with Baxter’s mother. They bonded over the fact that both were breast cancer survivors, and both were the mother of three sons. But while The Washington Post described O’Connor in 1989 as “the most powerful woman in the country,” Augusta Ruth Baxter was a Black woman with a high school education, who raised her sons in an inner-city neighborhood in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Baxter regularly hosted holiday parties at his home, and one year when Justice O’Connor arrived, “the first thing she asked was, in her manner: ‘Dean Baxter, where is your dear mother?'” When Baxter explained that his mother had been ill and was upstairs in her room, the justice asked, “may I go up?”
Quite a bit later, the time came to sit down for dinner, and Baxter went upstairs. “My mom was sitting in her comfort chair,” he said, and O’Connor was sitting on the hassock, “leaning on the arm of the chair, with her arm tucked into my mother’s arm.” When Baxter said dinner was being served, O’Connor said, “Dean Baxter, your mother and I are talking. When we are finished, we will be down.”
The current dean of the cathedral and his boss released a statement saying of O’Connor, “in many ways her judicial career reflected our church’s tradition of the ‘via media,’ or middle way. Like many Episcopalians, she felt most at home in the complicated center, eschewing the extremes of both left and right.”
In their tribute, Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde and Dean of the Cathedral Randolph Marshall Hollerith continued: “Justice O’Connor embodied an even-handed embrace of equal justice under law. By zealously clinging to the center, she rejected the false allure of polarized ideological purity.”
These days there is no guarantee that a Supreme Court nominee will even get a hearing, let alone be confirmed. But in 1981, O’Connor was confirmed as the first woman on the Supreme Court by a vote of 99 to 0. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, a Democrat, later apologized for missing the vote.
Then as now, abortion was a hot-button issue. Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for only eight years, and O’Connor’s nomination was opposed by activists who believed she would not vote to overturn it. And she did not, although in 1992 she supported Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which imposed some limits on abortion rights.
She lived her earliest years in a house with no electricity or running water, on a 198,000-acre ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border. She enrolled at Stanford University at the age of 16 and stayed there for law school, where she turned down a marriage proposal from a classmate named William Rehnquist. Whatever awkwardness this may have caused presumably dissipated during the two decades they served together on the highest court in the land.
She had served on the Arizona State Court of Appeals for a mere two years when she was plucked from obscurity to fulfill President Ronald Reagan’s campaign pledge to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. She was a conservative but not an ideologue, and as the decisive swing vote she had considerable influence in 5-4 decisions. She ceded that role to Anthony Kennedy when she retired in 2006.
She brought her lived experience to the court in multiple ways. She was, thus far, the last member to be named to the court after serving in elective office, as an Arizona state senator. Her political skills were such that within four years, she became the first woman to serve as majority leader in any state senate in the country. More than one commentator has observed that in negotiations with fellow justices, “she knew how to get to five.”
As a mother of three, she had a unique perspective on the abortion issue. The same Washington Post article recounts an abortion case in which an attorney told the court in oral arguments that historically, the line on abortion bans was generally drawn at “quickening or viability.”
“‘Well, there is a difference, is there not, between those two?’ asked Sandra Day O’Connor, the only justice [at that time] for whom ‘quickening,’ when fetal movement is first felt, is more than an abstraction.” Roughly speaking, it’s the difference between 16 weeks and 25 weeks.
As the first female Supreme Court justice, she worked hard to ensure she would not be the last. In that she was successful. Five women have followed her onto the court, and four of them currently serve.
She also was not the last Episcopalian, a title held for now by Neil Gorsuch.
