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Last October, when the US Supreme Court revealed that Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, was being treated for thyroid cancer, the news triggered urgent speculation about his replacement. Surprisingly, Rehnquist remains on the bench nine months later. On July 1, however, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor caught Court-watchers unprepared by declaring her intention to precede Rehnquist into retirement.

The 75-year-old breast cancer survivor said she wished to spend more time with her husband of 53 years, who suffers from Alzheimer's. In a letter she hand-delivered to the White House, O'Connor said her retirement would be "effective upon the nomination and confirmation of my successor." Appointed by Ronald Reagan, the Arizona jurist had become the Supreme Court's first female Justice in 1981.

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As Democrats hastened to praise O'Connor's moderation, characterizing her as an even-handed centrist, few chose to recall that she was part of the overtly partisan 5-4 majority that decided the 2000 Presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, or that she usually sided with the high court's conservatives.

Her exit nevertheless affords George W. Bush a far more potent opportunity to shape the Supreme Court's future than his impending task of replacing Rehnquist with a fresh conservative. O'Connor cast the pivotal vote on a number of critical 5-4 decisions that leaned to the left, including several pertaining to the death penalty and women's rights.

In 1989, she foiled a conservative effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing access to abortion. Three years later, she joined a five-justice majority in reaffirming Roe. In 2000, she helped strike down a Nebraska law banning the intact dilation and extraction method of terminating pregnancy, known to its detractors as "partial-birth" abortion.

O'Connor may have been willing to uphold the constitutional privacy principle that animates Roe, but her commitment to that principle stopped short of applying it to private sexual behavior by consenting adults. In 1986, she voted with the 5-4 majority on Bowers v. Hardwick, the Georgia case that certified the constitutionality of sodomy laws nationwide. In Bowers, the high court turned down a challenge to Georgia's sodomy statute by Atlanta bartender Michael Hardwick, arrested on sex charges by an officer who barged into his home with an erroneous citation for nonpayment of a small fine, and found him fellating another man. For gay Americans, Bowers was a serious defeat.

Gay activists cheered, however, when in Romer v. Evans (1993) the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down Colorado's discriminatory Amendment 2, legislation by ballot initiative that voided gay rights ordinances across the state and banned future passage of such laws. O'Connor's participation in the majority vote was to some observers a sign that her position on gay issues might be shifting.

In Lawrence v. Texas, the case that gutted American sodomy laws and finally overturned Bowers, she wrote a separate opinion that bolstered the five-justice majority without quite concurring. Applying the logic behind the Amendment 2 ruling, she approached state sodomy laws on an equal-protection basis. What she found unacceptable was not the illegal status of private, consensual gay sex, but the discriminatory application of separate standards to gay and straight citizens. Stating that sodomy laws were constitutional when they applied to both homosexual and heterosexual partners, she said she thought Bowers should stand.

In sexual minority issues, O'Connor's concerns about discrimination always had their limits. She was unwilling to extend those concerns to a dismissed bisexual schoolteacher in Rowland v. Mad River (1984), or a fired gay CIA employee in Webster v. Doe (1988). In June 2000, she voted to uphold the Boys Scouts of America's ejection of gay New Jersey scoutmaster James Dale after his picture was spotted in a gay publication.

Her record on sex-offender issues shows naiveté regarding sex-crime convictions, penal systems, and treatment programs. In Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), she backed the Orwellian majority assertion by Clarence Thomas that constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy did not apply to one-day-to-lifetime civil commitment of sex offenders already serving criminal sentences. (The civilly committed, Thomas reasoned, are being treated, not punished, even when they are being held in prisons and handled as prisoners.) O'Connor was similarly obtuse in McKune v. Lile (2002), an important Fifth Amendment case in which she capped a 5-4 majority's approval of coerced admissions of guilt for sex offenders ordered into treatment.

Such willingness to bend the Bill of Rights is not enough to satisfy George W. Bush, who has stated that he looks forward to appointing justices significantly to the right of O'Connor. His models are reactionary Clarence Thomas and paleoconservative Antonin Scalia.

When Bush chose longtime crony Alberto Gonzales to succeed John Ashcroft as US Attorney General, many believed the appointment was intended to launch the former White House counsel into the Supreme Court. But right-wing lobbyists including Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation have cautioned against choosing Gonzales to succeed O'Connor-- not because he has condoned torture, expressed contempt for due process, and helped create offshore American gulags at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but because they consider him soft on abortion.

The Right is determined to replace O'Connor with an anti-abortion hard-liner such as conservative appellate judge J. Michael Luttig, or Senator John Cornyn (R.-Texas). Toward that end, conservatives have targeted Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R.-Pennsylvania) and other legislators for a campaign of intimidation.

If the reversal or evisceration of Roe is a clear priority, a second objective is to undo Lawrence v. Texas. Apart from recriminalizing gay sex, the return of sodomy laws would mean shutting the door on gay marriage and reopening the portals of discrimination all over America.

In his blistering dissent to the Lawrence ruling, Justice Scalia spoke for many when he wrote, "Most Americans do not want persons who are openly engaged in homosexual conduct as partners in their businesses, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home."

When conservatives complain about "activist judges," they mean judges who vote on the side of civil liberties. The Right's real gripe is that the judicial system is not yet packed full of activists who serve its goals. In appointing judges to every level of the federal court system, President Bush is seeking to soothe and redress that complaint.

As The Guide goes to press, William Rehnquist has just undergone another ominous hospitalization. Bush, meanwhile, has not yet named O'Connor's successor. Confirmation of his choice, when it comes, seems almost certain.