That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post. An excerpt:

O’Connor was planning to stay on the Court for another year. She “knew that Rehnquist believed emphatically that the court shouldn’t have two retirements at the same time.” As he had put it to her earlier in the year, “We don’t need two vacancies.” So she figured that he would retire in the summer of 2005 and that she could retire the following summer.
But in early June 2005, Rehnquist “stunned [O’Connor] by telling her: ‘I want to stay another year.’” That meant that O’Connor had to “retire now or be prepared to serve two more years.” O’Connor’s beloved husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and she couldn’t see putting off caring full-time for him for another two years. So she realized it was her time to retire….
Rehnquist died on September 3, 2005, just before the confirmation hearings for O’Connor’s designated successor were scheduled to begin. Ironically, by persuading O’Connor to retire, Rehnquist ended up creating the two-vacancy scenario that he had sought to avoid and pushing confirmation of one of the vacancies at least two months into the Court’s new term.

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