Rep. George Santos, a New York Republican who won election last fall on what was later revealed to be a largely fabricated biography, today became only the sixth member of the House of Representatives ever to be expelled from Congress.

He’s also the first member to be expelled who did not support the Confederacy or get convicted in court. 

Following the release of a damning report from the GOP-led House Ethics committee last month, nearly half of Republicans joined with all but a handful of their Democratic colleagues to oust Mr. Santos Friday morning. Notably, all members of the Republican leadership, including the new House speaker, voted against Mr. Santos’ expulsion. It requires a two-thirds House vote to expel a member.

Many Republicans argued Mr. Santos should have his day in court, currently set for Sept. 9, 2024, before being removed. He has been indicted on a range of charges including conspiracy, wire fraud, theft of public money, and fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment benefits.

Mr. Santos’ conduct presented a test for Congress, and particularly his Republican colleagues, who have been struggling to govern with a narrow majority, now down to just eight seats. The audacity of his made-for-reality-TV story seemed to many a new low at a time of widespread public distrust in the institution, concerns about government investigations becoming politicized, and a new brazenness among lawmakers who in earlier days might simply have resigned.

With the Department of Justice conducting a concurrent criminal investigation into Mr. Santos, some said the case should play out in court rather than in Congress – and that expelling him prior to conviction would set a dangerous precedent. Others argued that Mr. Santos also violated House rules and must be held accountable.

“Today was a solemn day,” Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest, a Mississippi Republican who sponsored the expulsion resolution, told the Monitor upon walking out of the House chamber. “I don’t think anyone takes any joy in having to vote to expel a fellow member of Congress.”

Mr. Santos, who went by Anthony Devolder before his recent foray into politics, won election in a district Joe Biden carried by 8 points in 2020. He anchored his campaign in a storybook American Dream journey – the son of Brazilian immigrants who worked his way up to a career at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, accumulated more than a dozen properties by his mid-30s, and ran a charity that had purportedly rescued more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

The Wall Street firms, however, denied that he ever worked there. No records could be found of such extensive real estate holdings. And the IRS denied the existence of the purported charity, according to a December 2022 New York Times report. He also revised his claim to be Jewish, clarifying that he had meant he was “Jew-ish.”

A special election to fill Mr. Santos’ seat is expected to be held in February, giving Democrats an opportunity to try to flip the seat back to their party in a district President Joe Biden won in 2020. 

Spending in Atlantic City, Las Vegas

Three members of Congress were expelled in 1861 for supporting the Confederacy. Two others, in 1980 and 2002, were expelled after being convicted of bribery and other charges. All five were Democrats. 

While Mr. Santos has not been convicted of any crimes, the Ethics Committee’s 56-page report argued that the scope of his violations are “highly unusual and damning,” representing “fundamental ethical failings that go to the core of the legitimacy of the electoral process.”

The report, citing bank statements and other financial records, detailed a number of transactions that raised concerns about campaign funds being used for personal expenditures. These included $6,000 worth of purchases at a luxury shoe store on the heels of a large, unreported transfer of funds from his campaign accounts, as well as thousands of dollars of charges on the campaign’s dime at Atlantic City resorts, Las Vegas hotels and various spas – including one specializing in Botox. It also detailed a pattern of “repaying” himself for personal loans to his campaign, for which the committee could find no evidence that he had ever made.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP/File

U.S. Rep. Michael Guest listens to a reporter's question in Jackson, Mississippi, Nov. 8, 2022. The Republican chair of the House Committee on Ethics sponsored the resolution that expelled Republican George Santos Dec. 1, 2023.

Mr. Santos has blamed his treasurer’s bookkeeping for various campaign finance violations and reporting errors. This fraudulent reporting, the Ethics Committee said, not only misled the public but also helped him to meet benchmarks set by the national GOP. The party, which was looking to diversify its ranks, then invested in the campaign of the openly gay Latino millennial, helping him to victory. However, the report details texts, emails, and staffer accounts that show he was closely tracking his campaign finances. 

After failing to appear before the Ethics Committee, which said he “declined nearly every opportunity he was afforded under the Committee’s processes to provide a rebuttal to the allegations,” Mr. Santos is now accusing his colleagues of trampling due process. He says they are setting a dangerous precedent that will come back to haunt them and the institution.

“Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty, and they are in fact guilty until proven innocent?” he asked in a floor speech Tuesday night. 

But the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” is a threshold used in criminal law before taking away someone’s right to liberty, says Democratic Rep. Daniel Goldman, who previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York.

“No one has a right to serve in Congress,” says Representative Goldman, who represents New York’s 10th congressional district.

Many Republicans disagree, however, with some saying Mr. Santos had been unfairly targeted in a body that has seen plenty of other scandals. 

In the floor debate last night, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz cited the case of GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, who eventually pleaded guilty to misuse of campaign funds for extramarital affairs and other personal expenses, but who stayed in Congress for several years after his misdeeds were revealed before eventually resigning. He also asked why Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, who has been indicted for accepting bribes from foreign officials, not only is still serving but also is receiving classified reports.

Mr. Guest, the Republican Ethics Committee chair, argued that Mr. Santos had been afforded the due process laid out in the Constitution, but that the New York congressman had failed to appear before the committee, testify under oath, provide a written response to the allegations filed by his fellow members, or provide many of the documents requested by the committee’s investigation. 

That didn’t satisfy Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a leader within the House Freedom Caucus.

“Our members have forgotten that everybody is afforded due process under law, not due process under the Ethics Committee,” he said after the vote Friday. “What happened here today goes against the principles of our institutions.”

Mr. Santos: Done with “the circus”

Leading up to today’s vote, Mr. Santos struck a defiant tone.

“Bring it on,” he said Tuesday night on his way into the House chamber. 

“I’m done playing a part for the circus,” the congressman told reporters, though he refused to answer their questions about the report’s allegations. “I’m so bored of my colleagues trying to create something when there’s no there there.” 

In a three-hour conversation on X Spaces over the Thanksgiving holiday, hosted by Monica Matthews On Air, he called the report ”a political opposition hit piece at its best.”

“It was designed to smear me,” he said. The Ethics Committee is the sole House committee that is equally balanced between Democrats and Republicans, and the report was unanimous. 

“You want to expel me? I’ll wear it like a badge of honor,” said Mr. Santos, adding that his decision not to run for reelection was not an admission of guilt but that he had no interest in returning to a body full of “hypocrites,” “felons galore,” and “people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds.”

During the X Spaces conversation, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California chimed in and asked the congressman why he wouldn’t just apologize, saying it would go “a very, very long way.”

In January, less than a month into Mr. Santos’ freshman term, a Siena poll found that 78% of his constituents – including 71% of Republicans – wanted him to resign. 

“We just want to know that you feel awful for the things you have done,” said Representative Garcia. “I don’t want the apology for me, man. I think you owe the American public generally and your constituents, like, a direct apology.”

That never came, even after he was expelled Friday. He had uncharacteristically little to say as he walked out of the House chamber, got into a waiting Jaguar SUV, and was driven away.

(Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct a typo in the year in which the last member of Congress was expelled prior to Mr. Santos.)

James Oatway/Reuters

A displaced worker from Gaza cuts another's hair in a recreational center where hundreds of workers from Gaza are staying, in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 13, 2023. The workers, along with patients seeking medical care, were deported from Israel following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.

They pace the spartan hotel lobby, moving back and forth between the faux leather couches.

They all seem to be in a hurry, but with nowhere to go – holding phones, anxiously awaiting yet dreading the next call.

These unplanned guests – Palestinian residents of Gaza who were working or getting medical care in Israel when the war erupted – showed up at this three-star Ramallah hotel in the middle of an October night with little more than a change of clothes.

They do not know if their checkout date will be next week, next month, or next year.

Now stranded in the West Bank, these Gaza residents are receiving few answers but are finding rare solace in one another. Most decline to give their full name, to avoid running afoul of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or Israel.

“Our entire lives were turned upside down in an instant. We went from a dream to a nightmare, and we have no idea where we are heading next,” says Ahmed as he awaits a text update from his teenage son in Gaza City.

“Our bodies are physically in Ramallah, but our souls are in Gaza. We are lost.”

More than 12,000 Gaza Palestinians were working, living, or receiving medical treatment in Israel when Hamas attacked Oct. 7. As a gesture to relieve economic pressures in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israel had issued 18,000 permits to Gaza residents between 2022 and 2023.

Within hours of the attack, the Israeli government annulled all their work and residency permits and arrested several hundred.

The rest were unceremoniously dumped into the West Bank. Several thousand workers repatriated to Gaza during this past week’s cease-fire; today more than 4,000 Gazans remain stranded in shelters and hotels, separated from family members navigating missile strikes, food shortages, and damaged or destroyed homes as the war resumes.

Hotel Gaza

At the Retno Hotel at the edge of Ramallah, 100 Gaza residents awaiting the war’s end are in the lobby – always in the lobby.

On one November afternoon, the talk in the lobby is of loss – of homes, children, jobs – and needs, for food, water, and shelter back home and a clear future for them in the West Bank.

“You’re lucky your house lasted this long,” one woman says, consoling a shrieking woman who just received news her family home was destroyed.

Taylor Luck

Mahmoud Quffah, a Gaza Palestinian who quit his job in Ramallah to help provide for thousands of stranded Gazans in the West Bank, stands at the desk of the Retno Hotel, home to 100 displaced Gaza Palestinians in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 11, 2023.

Hanan, a mother of five who had been receiving cancer treatment in Israel and Jordan, returns to the lobby from a round of treatment at a nearby Ramallah hospital, yet all she can think about are her four young children trapped in Gaza.

“When your 5-year-old son calls you and tells you he feels like he is starving, he misses bread, and asks why you aren’t there to feed him, how do you think that makes you feel as a mother?” Hanan says. “Could you even think about putting food in your own mouth?” 

“We cannot eat, we cannot sleep, we cannot rest. We are like the living dead,” she says.

Lost future

The chatter inevitably drifts to the promising future that might have been. A future, they say, that was robbed.

“We were moving forward; it was a new chapter. There was hope,” says Ahmed, who was working for an Israeli construction firm in northern Israel when conflict erupted. “Life was just becoming beautiful again.”

When Ahmed received an Israeli work permit in December 2022, he went from earning 20 shekels a day ($5.40) as a Gaza City barber to making 300 shekels a day ($81) painting and plastering apartments with a company in the majority-Arab town of Sakhnin in the Galilee.

It was “life-transforming,” he says.

He eagerly swipes through photos on his phone of the dream house he built in Gaza City with nine months of salary in Israel, proudly pointing out the floodlights, gypsum ceiling decor, brand-new velvet sofas, and oak-wood closets.

It was a major upgrade from the aluminum-sided shack he had lived in with his five children.

He had only spent nine days in his dream house while on leave in Gaza in late September; he does not know its fate today. It is believed the house was struck by an Israeli missile.

“We were having big dreams for the future, ourselves and our children, for the first time in two decades,” Ahmed says.

“Just weeks ago, I was buying a TV for my son’s bedroom,” Ahmed says. “Now I am begging people on the phone, trying to find a working hospital or a way out of Gaza so he can finish chemotherapy.”

Mutual support

A feeling of helplessness grows with the losses. Abu Mohammed, in his late 50s, patiently waits to speak to a reporter as a “release.”

Sitting in the same lobby chair where he heard the news Oct. 17 that a missile strike hit his home in Gaza and killed his eldest son, Mohammed, he receives text updates from his two surviving sons. On broken legs, they were searching Rafah pharmacies for painkillers, but found none.  

On this day, like every day since Oct. 17, “all I can do is look at the photo that changed my life forever,” he says.

He lifts his phone, displaying a photo of Mohammed’s concrete-dust-covered hand poking out from the rubble of their home. The 19-year-old was going to study medicine to become a doctor; Abu Mohammed dreamed of dancing at his wedding. The thought brings him to tears. 

“Where is the humanity? We have lost our humanity,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like animals treat each other more humanely than people.”

Ahmed rushes over and gives Abu Mohammed’s shoulder a squeeze.

“We were strangers before, but now we are family,” Ahmed says. “We must lean on and support one another.”

Blame all around

As the war stretches on, anger toward Israel and bitterness toward Hamas grow.

“The money we were sending home was transforming lives and communities. Hamas didn’t think about that when they launched this attack and took us to war,” Ahmed seethes. “Did they think about our future? Our families’ lives?”

Abu Mohammed, eyes still welling up, says, “I am not absolving Israel of its culpability in murder, but the decision-makers in Gaza led us down a path of destruction, hardship, and war.”

“Our time working in Israel proved to me that Jews and Arabs can work and live together,” Ahmed says. “But the extremists on both sides have pulled us apart.”

Charity

The plight of the stranded Gaza residents has mobilized charity.

Leading the push is Mahmoud Quffah, a Gazan who had been working at a Ramallah fast-food restaurant when the war erupted. Unable to send his salary back to his wife and two young children in Gaza, he quit his job and volunteers full time organizing donations.

The Palestinian Authority pays to house the stranded Gazans while Mr. Quffah gathers donations of food, clothing, and medicine.  

Entering the lobby carrying bags of medicines, he ruffles the hair of a toddler waddling across the lobby with a Palestinian flag painted on his right cheek.

“There is nothing I can do to stop the war or help my family, but the very least I can do is help them,” says Mr. Quffah, gesturing to the guests. “They are Gazans like me. This is my extended family.”

He steps outside and tries to call his wife, whom he had not heard from in two days. His family had already survived a missile strike on his in-laws’ home in the Jabaliya camp. Once again, the call could not go through. He puts on a smile, walks back into the lobby, and lifts a toddler into the air.

His phone remains open to the last text message he sent her: “Tell me how you are doing. Just let me know you are alive.”

Days later, she responds, indicating they had evacuated to an UNRWA school in Gaza City. When war resumed Friday, he lost contact with her again.

Benoit Tessier/Reuters/File

Zhao Changpeng, founder of Binance, attends a conference in Paris, June 16, 2022. He has resigned as CEO, and the cryptocurrency exchange agreed to a $3.4 billion settlement for inadequate safeguards against money laundering and other illicit activity.

The Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza has pushed into the limelight an issue that’s been seething on the back burner for nearly a decade: the funding networks for terrorism.

Now, U.S. and other Western government watchdogs, legislators, and others have refocused on the problem. And especially on terrorists’ use of digital money – or cryptocurrency – that can be flashed around the world without the scrutiny of banks or regulators.

It’s easy to overstate the importance of cryptocurrency. Violent nonstate groups receive far more money through other formal and informal financial systems than from using bitcoin and other digital money, terror-finance experts say. But it’s still a concern, and the larger problem is a strategic one.

Just as Israeli and other intelligence agencies disregarded signs of a military buildup in Gaza, finance watchdogs were preoccupied with other matters. They missed the chance to squeeze Hamas’ and other groups’ funding before these groups could act. (Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department since 1997.)

“We have taken our eyes off the ball on terrorism issues,” says Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University. “I know it from the most reputable sources that the government is not collecting the data that it needs to be on either cryptocurrency or the use of credit cards, which is an essential way that Hamas is being funded at the moment.”

There are signs this may change. 

Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel has brought with it renewed scrutiny. On Nov. 27, the U.S. Treasury Department disclosed the existence of a terror-finance task force it joined with a dozen other nations and fraud-fighting groups in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Those nations include Israel, Australia, Germany, and tax havens Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.  

And cryptocurrency has become a focus. For example:

• Among the first entities sanctioned by the Treasury less than two weeks after the October attack was a Gaza-based cryptocurrency exchange, called Buy Cash Money and Money Transfer Company. Israel has linked the firm to a Hamas fundraising campaign and the United States. The U.S. Treasury claims the firm has been used by an Al Qaeda affiliate in Turkey and individuals connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

• Also in October, a bipartisan group of 105 U.S. senators and representatives urged the Biden administration to crack down on terrorists’ use of cryptocurrency. The action came a week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas and its ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad received as much as $134 million in digital funds between August 2021 and June 2023.

• On Nov. 21, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network announced a record $3.4 billion fine in a settlement with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. The government accused the firm of turning a blind eye to transactions made by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, and ISIS. Binance also agreed to five years of federal monitoring to ensure it would not facilitate such transactions in the future.

• In a Nov. 28 letter to Congress, the Biden administration asked for more power to scrutinize cryptocurrency exchanges that allow transactions by illicit groups. In a speech the following day, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo warned that the federal government would curtail cryptocurrencies if the industry failed to police such money flows.

The Binance settlement “is pretty huge,” says Matthew Levitt, director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It sends an extremely strong message to the industry. ... We’re serious about this.”

But many familiar with the battle against terror financing have seen this pattern before: A high-profile terrorist attack garners intense but temporary interest. Attention surged after 9/11 with the focus on the money flowing to Al Qaeda. It surged again when a U.S.-led coalition began fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014. But interest flagged each time as other crises diverted Washington’s attention.

“It’s a space of finite resources and constantly changing prioritization,” says Alex Zerden, a terror-financing expert formerly at the U.S. Treasury and now head of his own risk advisory firm, Capitol Peak Strategies in Washington. “Over the past several years, terrorist financing hasn’t been the dominating priority in an era of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, potential conflict with China, [and] the use of both sanctions and export controls” against nations rather than nonstate groups.

The problem with this on-again, off-again approach is that heightened vigilance is most needed before a terrorist attack, not after it.

“The preparatory piece ... costs much more money than the actual attack itself,” says Celina Realuyo, professor of practice at the Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at National Defense University. Fighters have to be transported, housed and fed in the run-up to any action. “An attack is in the thousands” of dollars, she adds. “But the support network is in the millions.”

Will the current scrutiny of Hamas financing also fade over time? 

“There’s concern that this [war in Gaza] may be a watershed for Hamas to enable greater charitable support as well as greater investment opportunities,” says Mr. Zerden of Capitol Peak Strategies. “The counterbalance is that there is renewed attention after years of de-prioritization against Hamas’s terrorist financing activity from like-minded governments. ... So you have these two competing forces. Which one is going to prevail? Unfortunately, only time will tell.”

Although the United States was founded, as John Adams once said, to be “a government of laws and not of men,” for more than two centuries it was almost exclusively men who wrote and interpreted those laws.

That was until Sandra Day O’Connor, raised on a remote cattle ranch in the rural Southwest, joined the United States Supreme Court.

Beyond shattering that glass ceiling, Justice O’Connor – who died Friday – left an indelible mark on American law and American society. For a time considered the most powerful woman in the country, she used her cautious and pragmatic approach to cases to shape the law on major issues ranging from abortion and affirmative action to executive branch war powers and the 2000 presidential election.

She was a trailblazer in more ways than one. Before she became a justice, she was the first woman to hold a leadership position in a state legislature, as the majority leader in the Arizona Senate. And after she retired from the high court she served as a leading advocate for civics education and judicial independence around the world. Tactfully – and sometimes bluntly – she asserted herself in the male-dominated realms of law and politics, paving the way for generations of women after her.

There have been five women justices on the Supreme Court since Justice O’Connor’s confirmation in 1981, but she can also be viewed as the end of an era – the last generation before the high court became dominated by Ivy League and federal appeals court graduates, a conservative but unpredictable jurist who thought always about the practical effects of the law.

“Justice O’Connor has a strong claim to be among the small handful of the most pivotal justices in the modern Supreme Court’s history,” says Justin Driver, a former clerk.

Aerobics and “consequentialism”

“Justice – At Last,” read the cover of Time magazine after her nomination to the Supreme Court. The U.S. Senate issued more press credentials for her confirmation hearing than for the Watergate hearings – and confirmed her with a 99-0 vote. Everything that followed that term was “astounding,” says Ruth McGregor, who clerked for Justice O’Connor that year.

“There were tears in the eyes of a lot of law clerks, including me, when she walked out from the curtain and took her place at the bench,” she adds. “That was such an important time for women in the law.”

Everything she did made history. The first woman ever to ask a question at oral argument. (The attorney talked over her.) The first woman ever to write an opinion. The first woman ever to write a dissent. Reporters noted every word and action, watched her drive to the court, watched her go out to dinner with her husband, John. Amid it all, she had to prove herself to her high court colleagues.

“She handled this all with a great deal of grace and with a great deal of calmness,” says Ms. McGregor. “It didn’t seem that she was under stress, but I think she must have been.”

One of her earliest impacts at the high court was to organize a morning aerobics class. The 8 a.m. sessions – for women only – quickly attracted members and custom T-shirts. (“Exercise Your Constitution, Motion Sustained”; “Loosen Up With The Supremes.”)

Justice O’Connor had little experience in constitutional law, having worked as a county court and state appeals court judge. But that experience in the lower reaches of the American judiciary gave her a keen interest in the practical effects the law had on ordinary people.

AP/File

President Ronald Reagan sits beside Supreme Court nominee Sandra Day O’Connor as they pose for photographers in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, July 16, 1981.

She disapproved of grand unifying theories of legal interpretation – such as originalism, a now prominent philosophy that the Constitution should be interpreted as its 18th century authors would have intended. They gave too little weight to the specific facts and context of cases. In “First,” a biography of Justice O’Connor, author Evan Thomas describes her judicial philosophy as “consequentialism.”

“She was very fact-based, she cared about the record, about the practical consequences” of a decision, says Mr. Thomas. “She was sympathetic to cases involving women and children.”

“Especially on the tough social issues like affirmative action and abortion,” he adds, she favored “inching the law forward, trying not to get too far ahead or behind of public opinion.”

“The O’Connor Court” rises

She had been nominated as part of a long-term response to what conservatives viewed as the liberal excesses of the Warren Court. Justice Harry Blackmun, in particular, feared that she would be the fifth vote to overturn his opinion in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

Justice O’Connor instead advocated for preserving Roe while allowing states to restrict abortion access unless it placed an “undue burden” on the mother. 

In 1992, the high court heard a challenge to a Pennsylvania law requiring a woman seeking an abortion to first get consent from her parents and inform her husband, among other requirements.

Justice O’Connor met secretly with moderate Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy to craft an opinion preserving most of Roe. Planned Parenthood v. Casey became one of the major precedents upholding abortion rights in America.

“I think Justice Kennedy trusted both her instinct on what would happen to the integrity of the court if they had gone so far as to overrule Roe completely, and also her notion about what would happen to women,” says Kathryn Kolbert, who argued against the Pennsylvania law before the Supreme Court. The spousal notice requirement, in particular, troubled the former state court judge.

“She had a really firm understanding of what women in abusive relationships go through,” adds Ms. Kolbert. “I didn’t always agree with every opinion she wrote, but I thought she was an incredibly conscientious justice, she was incredibly empathetic, she understood and looked to how laws affected real people.”

The Casey decision was part of a period where Justice O’Connor’s vote was so decisive the high court became known as “the O’Connor Court.” The moniker was “an exaggeration,” the justice said in 2011, though in 24 years on the bench, she was in the majority in 330 5-4 cases.

“She had a keen instinct about where the middle was, and what the country could stand,” said Mr. Thomas in a 2018 interview.

Above all, Justice O’Connor appreciated the need for the Supreme Court to be pragmatic and fix problems that were affecting the country.

That approach didn’t always pay off. When a recount in Florida held up the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, she was one of five justices – all nominated by Republican presidents – who voted to hear the case and, ultimately, stop a recount and hand the White House to President Bush. It was one of her few regrets in her career.

Instead of fixing a problem, “probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day,” she said in a 2013 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Harry Cabluck/AP/File

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor smiles before administering the oath of office to members of the Texas Supreme Court, Jan. 6, 2003, in Austin, Texas.

A whip-smart cowgirl

Growing up on the Lazy B Ranch, Sandra Day started to read at age 4 and learned to brand a calf and fire a rifle before her 10th birthday. Her childhood friends were the adult cowboys she would join on roundups.

Most importantly, the harsh realities of Depression-era ranch life taught her the values of selflessness and self-reliance, and forged a relentless work ethic she carried her entire life.

Tasked one blazing hot morning with bringing lunch to her father and the cowboys on a roundup, she blew a tire on the drive out and spent over an hour changing it. When she finally reached them, her father didn’t sympathize. “You should have started earlier,” he told her. “You need to expect anything out here.”

That became the message to generations of O’Connor law clerks: no excuses, the work has to get done no matter what.

“I assume you’re calling about secretarial work?”

In the spring of 1952, two promising young students graduated from Stanford University Law School. William Rehnquist and Sandra Day knew each other well – they had dated for a while, and he had even proposed to her.

She said no, but her former beau landed on his feet. Graduating first in his class, he left for Washington, D.C. to clerk for Justice Robert Jackson and would go on to serve as an associate justice and chief justice of the Supreme Court for 36 years.

Sandra Day graduated third in her class. The first woman to edit the Stanford Law Review, she called 40 law firms looking for a job. Only one gave her an interview: the Los Angeles firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “Well Miss Day,” she recalled the firm’s interviewer asking, “how well can you type?”

A few years later, her husband took a job at a law firm in Phoenix, Arizona. Again, no law firms were interested in hiring a woman. She opened a small law office in a suburban shopping center with another lawyer from Massachusetts.

Did it ever make her – third in her class at Stanford, first woman on law review – angry?

“Never anger, but, ‘Things will change,’ she said. ‘Things will change,’” recalls Gay Wray, a friend of the justice since her law practice days. “That sort of thing was never going to keep her down.”

It was in those years that she became a mother, giving birth to three sons, and became involved in state politics. She soon took a leading role in advancing womens’ rights – albeit incrementally – as a state lawmaker in Arizona.

Less than two months in, she helped pass legislation abolishing a state law limiting women to an eight-hour work day, but her record on women’s rights remained mixed. Most notably, she let the Equal Rights Amendment – a constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed equal legal rights for all Americans regardless of sex – die in committee, worried that it didn’t have the votes to pass. Arizona was one of six states to not ratify the amendment before a congressionally imposed 1979 deadline.

“Would I call her a feminist? No,” says Ms. Wray. “She was definitely for furtherment of women’s rights, but she would not knock down a man to do that. It was the best person for the job, that was always her thought.”

She later ran for, and won, a seat on the Maricopa County Superior Court – although she criticized the popular election of judges her entire career, and was one of the last popularly elected judges in the county. 

By then, the O’Connors had become one of the most influential and popular families in Arizona politics. After Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, became governor in 1978, a movement to draft her to challenge him in 1982 started to build. In 1979, however, a vacancy appeared on the state court of appeals, and Mr. Babbitt selected Justice O’Connor. 

She didn’t serve on the Arizona Court of Appeals for long. Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 having promised to nominate the first woman justice, and Justice Potter Stewart soon retired. Before long, the new Arizona appeals court judge got a call from William French Smith, President Reagan’s attorney general, about an interview for a “federal position.” Mr. Smith had been a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the Los Angeles law firm that had asked her three decades earlier how well she could type.

“I assume you’re calling about secretarial work?” she replied.

“A true love story”

The constant in her trailblazing path to the Supreme Court was John O’Connor. Their marriage had been one of mutual, unwavering support and sacrifice. She moved to Germany, then Phoenix, for the sake of his career, and he had moved to Washington for hers. In 2000 he was diagnosed with dementia and she cared for him – on top of all her work on the court – until 2006, when his condition worsened.

She had been contemplating retirement from the high court since 1996, Mr. Thomas wrote in his biography, but didn’t want a Democrat to nominate her successor. With George W. Bush in the White House, she decided to step down in 2006. Within six months of her retirement, however, her husband could no longer recognize her. 

“He sacrificed for her and then she sacrificed for him. It’s a great love story,” says Mr. Thomas.

After he passed away in 2009 she devoted herself to traveling the U.S. and the world, advocating for judicial independence and civics education. iCivics, a nonprofit she founded in 2009 to transform and promote civics education in schools, still operates today.

She also watched with unease as her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito, helped an increasingly conservative court undo major aspects of her legacy, including upholding a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, relaxing rules on campaign spending, and chipping away at affirmative action in schools. The court eventually overturned Roe last year, and affirmative action this past summer.

“She found it painful to watch some of her major legacies be eroded,” says Professor Driver, who clerked for her that first year after her retirement.

Her steadfast belief in treating each case in isolation, focusing on its specific facts and context and eschewing a broad judicial philosophy, disenchanted her with movement conservatives who were growing in number and influence.

When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2016 having promised to nominate reliable conservatives to the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court and lower courts shifted further to the right, most notably with the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The watchword in the Trump White House at the time – according to Ruth Marcus, author of a book on Justice Kavanaugh’s bitter confirmation fight – was “no more O’Connors.”

Today, Justice O’Connor’s legacy is visible across her home state. The Arizona State University law school bears her name, as does the federal courthouse in Phoenix. Sept. 25, the day she was sworn into the Supreme Court, has been celebrated as Sandra Day O’Connor Day in Arizona since 2018.

She withdrew from public life that year after being diagnosed with dementia. Friends and colleagues would say there could only ever be one Sandra Day O’Connor.

“She made it easier for people to imagine women as judges, or full professors, or deans of law schools,” says Ms. McGregor. “Once you have someone as a Supreme Court justice, doing the hardest job in law, you can’t really argue women can’t do something [else] in the law.”

When Shikuku Willy Ooko was in his early 20s, he was deeply taken with the Afro-Alpine forests of central Kenya. So much so that he decided to buy 15 acres of woodland adjacent to Mount Kenya National Park & Reserve, in the small market town of Naro Moru, a base for hikers ascending Mount Kenya. 

More than 30 years later, in the valley beneath the majestic snow-capped volcano, Mr. Ooko’s home is one of the few plots still flourishing with indigenous trees and plants. In contrast, much of the national park has been heavily logged.

And it is further being eroded as pastoralists, pushed off their traditional rangelands by drought, turn to grazing their flocks on the mountain’s flanks. This encroachment is a lose-lose situation: The grazing is not nutritious for livestock, and the delicate Afro-Alpine soil and plants can take decades to regenerate.

“Mount Kenya is a national park [only] above the tree line,” Mr. Ooko says. “The demarcation considered only the mountain ecosystem, without putting much thought into the forested portion.” 

The uniqueness of the Mount Kenya region – its remoteness and fragility – is exactly what makes it difficult to safeguard. Though the Kenya Forest Service, a state corporation, has made restocking and sustainably managing all public forest plantations its second priority, the burden of conservation has fallen on the shoulders of local individuals such as Mr. Ooko.

Playing politics with trees

A seasoned outdoors guide, Mr. Ooko knows that his livelihood, along with that of thousands of guides and porters in the region, depends on the health and robustness of his backyard, which is home to an ancient extinct volcano that is Africa’s second-highest peak.

Born in semiarid Baringo County in the Great Rift Valley, he settled in the heartland of the Mount Kenya region. He then trained with the National Outdoor Leadership, an American nonprofit outdoor educational school based in Naro Moru, the county’s main town.

In those days “there was such amazing primary growth along the Naro Moru River,” he recalls wistfully. But he feared the government would be unable to preserve such a place. Mr. Ooko’s premonition proved correct. 

Kang-Chun Cheng

Villagers living near the western section of the Mount Kenya National Park & Reserve help with a tree-planting initiative to counter rampant logging that has been degrading their forest for decades.

Recently, Kenyan President William Ruto’s contradictory statements on forest management have spurred concerns among environmental activists and politicians alike. On the one hand, he has announced plans to plant 15 billion trees. But on the other, he has also permitted logging in previously protected forests, purportedly to provide jobs for impoverished youths. It is the latest misstep in a long and marred history of using the forests for political purposes.

In the 1990s, some communities native to the Mount Kenya region were forced out of their ancestral homes in the forest during a land grab by the government. Ahead of highly contested elections, decadeslong ruler Daniel arap Moi removed protection from much of the park and doled out parcels of pristine, old-growth forest to politically connected allies in an effort to win votes.

“It was supposed to be a temporary relocation,” says James Kagambi, a veteran mountaineer and conservationist. “But people were never able to live on their generational land in the same way again.”

There were also devastating ecological repercussions. The rich and diverse vegetation growing in such high-altitude forest zones is extremely delicate; research has shown that it’s one of the ecosystems most susceptible to climate change on Earth. The new owners denuded the land, turning it into farmland, seen as far more profitable.

Stripping the forest of its official protection triggered intense logging. Timber merchants with official licenses could log at will, while local people, who lacked political connections, got hold of power saws that they used to cut trees down under the cover of night. “It was a 24-hour rape of rich, rich forest cover,” says Mr. Ooko.

Still, some locals fought hard against the devastation. In 2004, Wangari Maathai, who was born locally, became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for the manner in which her sustainable development and conservation approach embraced democratic values. Against difficult odds, others are continuing the fight, too.

Earlier this year, Mr. Kagambi, the conservationist, attended a tree-planting exercise in Naro Moru.

The problems caused by uncontrolled grazing might be manageable if only a few dozen families were involved, he says. “But this is amongst [well] connected individuals, involving people in the government.”

Droughts cause forest wildfires

At the same time, increasingly frequent and longer droughts are pushing poorer herders to range farther onto the mountain to save their cattle. 

Kang-Chun Cheng

A boy herds sheep belonging to his extended family in a section of forest in central Kenya.

Susie Weeks, the executive director of the conservation organization Mount Kenya Trust, says that in recent years, herders have even built animal pens within legally protected areas. “It’s a bit of a jarring sight,” Ms. Weeks says, “when [foreign] visitors have to pay a hefty fee to enter the park but then come across huge herds of grazing animals in the fragile environment.” 

The laws protecting that environment are in place, Ms. Weeks adds, but they are insufficiently enforced. “Rangers at each gate are limited,” she points out.

Phinneas Rewa, a Kenya Forest Service officer with three decades of experience, points to another problem. Wildfires have been increasing in both intensity and frequency on Mount Kenya as a result of the droughts. Twenty years ago, he says, he never saw any animals in his sector of the mountain. But since then, “frequent fires have burned down trees, creating grasslands, which are very conducive to grazing.”

When he’s at home in Naro Moru in between expeditions, Mr. Kagambi advocates for tree planting, particularly among kids. “It’s something I grew up doing,” he explains. “When I was young, my dad would give all of us kids 10 seedlings to plant and take care of. Somehow, he knew the connections between trees and rain.”

It’s a practice Mr. Kagambi has kept alive despite persisting challenges with climate and cattle; it is not uncommon for livestock to trample the young trees that he and his protégés have planted. “We just keep going,” he says. “It’s something I value, and I think we should plant more.”

AP

A man sells fruit in Lagos, Nigeria, Nov 29. Nigeria's leader on Wednesday presented a $34 billion spending plan for 2024 with a focus on stabilizing Africa's largest economy.

The world spends almost 10% of global economic output on keeping fossil fuel costs artificially low for consumers, according to the International Monetary Fund. Economists have warned for decades that these energy subsidies do far more harm than good. Yet governments are reluctant to drop them – and it’s not hard to see why. Last year, 148 countries saw more than 12,500 street protests over rising costs of living.

That is why Nigeria’s latest budget, proposed this week, bears scrutiny by world leaders trying to solve the braided crises of debt, poverty, and climate change. The fiscal blueprint rests on a bold stroke earlier this year in a country where soaring inflation coincides with habitual corruption and chronically low citizen trust in public institutions. In his inaugural address in May, President Bola Tinubu announced an immediate end to all subsidies for fossil fuels.

Ordinary Nigerians felt the pinch overnight. Yet five months later Africa’s most populous nation remains calm. One reason may be in the trade-offs. For years, Nigeria spent more to keep pump prices among the lowest in the world than it did on social services. Now those funds – equal to nearly a third of the total budget – are earmarked for public goods such as education and health care.

But Nigeria’s restoration of public confidence may rest as well on a deeper impulse toward honesty. “To improve the effectiveness of our budget performance,” Mr. Tinubu told parliament on Wednesday, “government will focus on ensuring value for money, greater transparency, and accountability.”

Nigeria’s cold-turkey approach is more aggressive than most advocates recommend. While economists draw a causal link between fuel subsidies and an index of miseries – poverty, corruption, cross-border smuggling, and even violent extremism – they warn that lifting the subsidies too quickly may deepen instability.

But such reforms are gaining global currency. Indonesia, Jordan, and Morocco have managed to reduce subsidies gradually without sparking unrest. A World Bank study published Monday found that 80% of 37,000 people surveyed in 12 countries stretching from Bolivia to Kazakhstan supported trading fuel subsidies for better schools, health care, and infrastructure.

Ending such subsides is also key to mitigating climate change. In October, Uzbekistan became the first country to sign a credit deal with the World Bank specifically designed to boost climate policy reforms, including ending fossil fuel subsidies. The International Institute for Sustainable Development has estimated that just eliminating such subsidies would reduce global greenhouse emissions by up to 10% by 2030.

If “we could see emissions reductions at 2%, or 3%, that ... [would likely be] the starting point of an unstoppable trajectory, which would only go faster and faster,” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.

A critical byproduct of that shift, he and others note, may be a renewal of public trust. “Nigeria’s experience suggests that scrapping subsidies while avoiding public outcry requires exposing their many flaws,” the International Food Policy Research Institute observed this week in a blog post. In “countries where trust in government remains low, direct experience of the subsidies’ negative effects could go a long way toward bringing citizens on board.”

By exposing its citizens to the true cost of the energy they consume, Nigeria has embarked something more than an economic transformation. It is democratizing solutions to larger problems like climate change through transparency.