In a sense, two cases of legal discrimination 120 years apart led to the event that occurred this week (Sept. 25) in 1981 when Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first woman justice in the history of the Supreme Court.  For it was in the 1830s, while working in her father’s law firm, that Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw first-hand the gender discrimination that would convert her into a feminist and inspire her to lead the woman’s movement toward equal rights.

And it was in the 1950s, after graduating near the top of her class at Stanford law school, that one of the beneficiaries of Elizabeth Stanton’s equal rights crusade — the young Sandra Day from El Paso, Texas — experienced such pervasive gender discrimination that no law firm would hire her for a job commensurate with her talent and school ranking, forcing her to turn to the public sector as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California.  From that humble beginning, Sandra Day O’Connor — she married John O’Connor shortly after graduation — would serve as a civilian lawyer for the army, an assistant attorney general for the state of Arizona, and an Arizona state senator, where she became the first woman ever to serve as majority leader of a state senate.  She left the Arizona senate when then-Governor Bruce Babbitt appointed her to the Arizona Court of Appeals, where she served for two years before President Ronald Reagan nominated her for the Supreme Court.

The appointment was both good politics and the honoring of a pledge Reagan had made during his presidential campaign, that he would nominate a woman to the Supreme Court “at the earliest opportunity.”  O’Connor replaced the retiring Potter Stewart, a conservative judge appointed by President Eisenhower in the 1950s, and although O’Connor was considered a moderate on the abortion issue, her supporters believed that she was sufficiently conservative to uphold the doctrine of judicial restraint.

In hindsight it didn’t quite work out that way.  Although she sided with the court’s conservative faction early on, throughout her career Justice O’Connor was a more pragmatic conservative with an activist streak.  Often voting with the liberal wing, she became, in the court’s parlance, a “swing vote” who could go either way on an issue, but tended to chart a moderate course that — her supporters contended — helped ameliorate the often sharply divided court.

In that sense, O’Connor was like many of the Supreme Court justices who preceded her, and succeeded her, defying both the expectations and the political and social agendas of the presidents who appointed them.  The one difference is that O’Connor was the first to do it from the perspective of a woman. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be proud.

Of all of President Franklin Roosevelt’s many domestic achievements, none exceeds the one that became law this week (Aug. 14) in 1935. The Social Security Act was the centerpiece of FDR’s vision to provide financial security to millions of Americans devastated by the Great Depression.

To some extent the Social Security program contributed to Roosevelt’s reputation as a “big government liberal” who wanted to soak the rich to provide bounteous social programs for the less fortunate — turning America into a “nanny state,” with the federal government as nanny.  Regarding his overall presidency, there is much truth to that belief, but with respect to Social Security, FDR insisted that any plan to provide “security” to the public must be funded by individual contributions, not general taxation.  He wanted to model Social Security after private insurance plans — pay in now, take out later.

But there were obstacles. First were the legal roadblocks, including the dubious constitutionality of putting the federal government in the insurance business (Congress becoming a federal “Mutual of Omaha” was not in the Framers’ original plan).  Second, taxing portions of a worker’s paycheck to pay into the Social Security fund would temporarily “freeze” that income, which otherwise would have been spent on consumer goods — a deflationary step that was the last thing the depressed U.S. economy needed.

Third, there was the income redistribution conundrum.  Older workers with only a few years to pay into the system would inevitably receive more in benefits than they contributed, leaving younger workers to support them by paying into the system for longer periods. Fourth, the tax was regressive, taking a larger bite out of the paychecks of poorer workers.  Fifth, whether the federal plan would supplant state plans or coexist with them was an issue that put the Supreme Court (which frequently derailed FDR’s New Deal) at odds with several states.

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