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But the protests from the New Right were blistering. "We feel we've been betrayed," charged Paul Brown, head of the antiabortion Life Amendment Political Action Committee. Brown claimed that Reagan had violated a Republican Party platform plank, which declared that only people who believe in "traditional family values and the sanctity of the innocent human life" should be made judges. "We took the G.O.P. platform to be the Bible," he said. Carolyn Gerster, former president of the National Right to Life Committee and a physician from Scottsdale, Ariz., who knows O'Connor well, argued that the judge "is unqualified because she's proabortion. We're going to fight this one on the beaches." Also leading the charge from the right were Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus, and Richard Viguerie, publisher of Conservative Digest. Declared Viguerie: "We've been challenged. The White House has said we're a paper tiger. They've left us no choice but to fight."
Despite the outcry, the rightists had no effective leader in the Senate who could influence the outcome of O'Connor's confirmation hearings and floor vote. North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms was urged to take up the cause, but remained aloof last week. Trying to stamp out the brushfire, Reagan met with Helms to assure him that O'Connor's legislative record was not clearly pro-ERA and pro-choice on abortion, as her opponents had charged. Reagan declared that "I am completely satisfied" with O'Connor's attitude. In a 45-minute meeting with the President at the White House on July 1, O'Connor had told Reagan that she found abortion "personally repugnant," and that she considered abortion "an appropriate subject for state regulation."
Much of the furor was based on O'Connor's votes in the Arizona senate. Far more important than her stand on abortion—an issue on which virtually no current woman jurist could fully satisfy the New Right—was whether she was qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. On that point, legal scholars acquainted with her past and lawyers who had worked with her in Arizona were in wide agreement: while she had much to learn about federal judicial issues, she was a brilliant lawyer with a capacity to learn quickly. Indeed, her legislative background gives her a working knowledge of the lawmaking process that none of the current Justices can match.
"She's entirely competent, a nominee of potentially great distinction," said Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe. Yale Law Professor Paul Gewirtz termed O'Connor "smart, fair, self-confident and altogether at home with technical legal issues." Michigan Law's Yale Kamisar, a judicial liberal, said of Reagan: "Give the devil his due; it was a pretty good appointment."