Nominee called conservative, but left is happier than right

WASHINGTON – Few would have predicted that President Reagan’s first nominee to the Supreme Court would be greeted by harsh opposition from the National Right to Life Committee and kind words from the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet that is just what happened to the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor, 51, a conservative Arizona judge and a Stanford Law School classmate of William H. Rehnquist, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most doctrinaire conservative. Anti-abortion groups noted that Reagan had endorsed the Republican platform’s pledge to appoint federal judges who “respect traditional family values and the sanctity of human life.” And now, National Right to Life Committee president J.C. Wilke complained, the nomination of O’- Connor was “a repudiation of the Republican platform.” As a two-term senator in the Arizona legislature, where she was . the first woman in the nation to be a majority leader, O’Connor voted to legalize abortion in 1970 and against a resolution urging Congress to pass an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in 1974, according to the committee’s research. Despite all this flak, lawyers, politicians and journalists in Phoenix describe O’Connor as extremely bright and analytical, a superb political leader – and not controversial. “Senator O’Connor has the reputation of being a conservative but certainly not a doctrinaire conservative.” said Louis Rhodes, director of the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. “I don’t know if she’s ever been involved in anything