O’Connor hearings bland in ‘lack of controversy’

WASHINGTON – In the end, the hearings were so bland that even ~e presence of television cameras couldn’t keep the U.S. Senators in the room. And the lack of controversy surrowiding Sandra Day O’Connor should continue through Tuesday, when the Arizona judge is expected to have her Supreme Court nomination confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Like all current justices except William Rehnquist – her fellow Arizonan and old Stanford Law School classmate who received 26 negative votes a decade ago – O’Connor can anticipate opposition by fewer than a dozen of the 100 senators. She received en_thusiastic ~upport at the hear ings from women’s groups, the customary bipartisan home-state delegation and most of the committee’s senators. O’Connor’s strongest opponents, the antiabortion activists, were split by President Reagan’s hardball politics. In a letter widely circulated in Right to Life circles last month, he charged that Carolyn F. Gerster, a co-founder of Arizona Right to Life, had “a record of vindictiveness.” That attack on a potentially dangerous witness dampened the enthusiasm of some other antiabortion leaders, who argued either that Reagan was too valuable an ally to irritate in a peripheral fight, or that failure to defeat O’Connor after an all-out effort would be politically debilitating. Gerster, who described herself as a social friend and political opponent of O’Connor, might have raised squarely the issue of O’Connor’s integrity. Instead, the physician’s