by Matt Barr

Remember me fondly if I'm right

With Ms. Justice O'Connor's resignation, I need to stick by my previous prediction that Theodore Olson will be the nominee. He is the rightmost nominee it would be possible to confirm, in my view (a plus for the President, whether you or I think it's good or not), because of his connection to the tragedy of September 11, and because he was confirmed four years ago as Solicitor General.

I realize there is a great chance the nominee to replace O'Connor "will not be a white male of European ancestry," but I won't change my prediction.

For your edification, since I'm probably the only lonely outpost on the Internet planting my flag on Olson, here are some excerpts from the Solicitor General's Federalist Society lecture in November, 2001.

From its birth, this nation and the American people have offered sanctuary and shelter to persons of all faiths. Our Constitution -- always with the support of our people -- has again and again extended its embrace to the unpopular, the unusual, the unconventional and the unorthodox. We protect not only those who will not salute our flag, but those who would spit upon it or burn it. We regularly pledge our allegiance to a constitution that shelters those who refuse to pledge their allegiance to it.

Far from tyrannizing those who worship a particular God or embrace a particular religion, we protect those who worship any God - or no God. Indeed, Americans have defended with their lives persons whose religious convictions preclude them from taking up arms to defend the same Constitution that gives them the right to refrain from defending it....

Abraham Lincoln was paraphrasing our declaration of independence when he characterized our nation as having been "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That revolutionary document set down our collective belief in unalienable human rights to liberty, freedom and equality, the proposition that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, the principle that tyrants who would oppress their people are unfit to be rulers of a free people, and the right to the pursuit of happiness. How can these terrorists ever prevail if these American ideals are not only allowed to be expressed, but to succeed so dramatically, and to inspire so many people throughout the world for so many centuries?

The answer is simple, the terrorists of September 11 cannot prevail in a world occupied by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the White House. They cannot co-exist with these ideals, these principles, these institutions and these symbols. So they cannot survive, much less prevail, in the same world as America and its people. So they must try to destroy America, and the principles for which it stands.

We do not claim that America has been or is today without imperfections and shortcomings. Our constitution was undeniably flawed at its origin. Implementation of our lofty ideals has never been without error, and some of our mistakes have been shameful. But the course of our history has been constant, if occasionally erratic, progress from the articulation of those lofty ideals to the extension of their reality to all our people - those who were born here and those, from hundreds of diverse cultures, who flock to the American soil because of those principles and the opportunities they promise....

People who write regularly for newspapers and who offer opinions on television, or who send advice to us from other parts of the world, sometimes say that America is too rich, lazy, complacent, frightened, soft and enervated to fight this fight. That we have no stamina, strength, will, patience, or steel. That we will collapse.

They are so wrong. We will prevail for the very reason that we have been attacked. Because we are Americans. Because the values that made us free, make us strong; because the principles that made us prosperous, make us creative, resourceful, innovative, determined and fiercely protective of our freedoms, our liberties and our rights to be individuals and to aspire to whatever we choose to be. Those values and those characteristics will lift us and will defeat the black forces who have assaulted our ideals, our country and our people.

The very qualities that bring immigrants and refugees to this country in the thousands every day, made us vulnerable to the attack of September 11, but those are also the qualities that will make us victorious and unvanquished in the end. These dreadful, despicable people have hurt us, but they can never conquer us.

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