Election Night, 2000.

US Supreme Court Justice Sandra O'Connor and her husband John are watching the returns

at a party at a friend's house.

When the networks initially call Florida for Democrat Al Gore, O'Connor looks upset and

agitated.

This is terrible one of those present, the call to her saying, that means it's over.

She gets up and walks out.

Her husband John confides to the party goers that his wife had been hoping to retire.

But wouldn't do so if a Democrat was going to nominate her successor.

That anecdote first reported in Newsweek magazine more than 18 years ago, would very soon take

on great significance.

When just a few weeks later, O'Connor joined with four other conservative Supreme Court

justices to stop the Florida recount then underway, handing George W. Bush the presidency.

It was perhaps the most consequential case of O'Connor's trailblazing tenure on the Supreme

Court.

Wleshed out with new details by author Evan Thomas in his new biography of O'Connor first.

As Thomas tells it, O'Connor agreed to join the court's conservative majority, not because

of her partisan leanings, but because she convinced herself that a continued recount would result

in political chaos that would further divide the country.

But it was a decision Thomas reveals that she would soon regret and even told one of

our clerks so.

Maybe the court should have said we're not going to take it goodbye.

...