It is understandable that liberal Democratic presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, loaded the Supreme Court with liberal, Democratic justices.

What is far harder to understand is how a whole succession of conservative Republican presidents -- Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41 -- managed to appoint so many liberals to the Supreme Court.

All these presidents ran on the idea that what courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, needed were judges who followed the law instead of making up their own new laws.

Voters who put these Republican presidents in the White House repeatedly found themselves disappointed with many, if not most, of their nominations of Supreme Court justices.

President Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, who created a "constitutional right" to an abortion out of thin air, just as previous liberal justices had created all sorts of constitutional rights out of thin air for criminals, vagrants, and others.

President Ford appointed John Paul Stevens, whose long history of liberal votes was climaxed by his 2005 decision that politicians can seize private homes and turn them over to other private individuals, who want to replace these homes with amusement parks or shopping malls -- which bring in more tax revenues.

Even Ronald Reagan, so eloquent against group preferences and quotas, announced that he was going to appoint "a woman" to the Supreme Court during the 1980 election campaign -- and later looked for a woman to appoint.

That is how a mid-level state court judge with no experience in the federal judiciary became Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Yet no one said that she was "unqualified" as they would later say of Clarence Thomas, whose credentials greatly outweighed hers.

Now, a quarter of a century later, Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy of incoherent Supreme Court opinions on such issues as affirmative action and abortion have made a mockery of the very concept of law.

Given the momentous impact of Supreme Court decisions on 300 million Americans today and on generations yet unborn, it is staggering that either presidents or justices themselves cannot keep their eye on the ball and understand the high stakes at issue.

Sandra Day O'Connor was quota-minded from before she was appointed and after she retired. Even before she herself was in the running, she had urged President Nixon to appoint "a woman" to the Supreme Court and, decades later, she lamented that President Bush did not appoint "a woman" to succeed her. Continued...