July 19, 2005 – CBS Radio News – NPR Special Events Coverage – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
July 19, 2005 – Most eyes on SCOTUS this day. The morning started off with speculation, but turned into revelation as President George W. Bush announced his choice to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the Supreme Court. John G. Roberts, at 50 the youngest nominee in recent history to the highest court in the country, represented a decided shift to the right in the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Roberts served on the U.S. Court of Appeals, as well as aide to Reagan-era U.S. Attorney General William French Smith and later to White House counsel Fred Fielding. Even though Roberts was appointed to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist prompted Bush to withdraw his nomination of Roberts to replace O’Connor, but to nominate him to replace Rehnquist. By September SCOTUS had a new face on the bench.
There was other happening this July 19th; the axe was cutting deep at another high-tech giant. Hewlett-Packard, the nation’s number one printer maker slashed some 14,500 jobs, 10% of their workforce in an attempt to save some $2 billion a year. H-P’s justification: Getting rid of all the people and the products which weren’t performing to expectations. Hewlett-Packard has been having mixed financial reports as the result of their purchase of Compaq Computers three years earlier. That deal was supposed to help H-P run with Dell and IBM.
And Hurricane Emily was back in the news – this time for a regrouping off the Northeast coast of Mexico. Parts of Texas were expecting to get torrential rain, at the very least, when the hurricane made landfall later on in the day.
And that’s just a little of what happened, this day in 2005 as reported by CBS Radio News and Special Events Coverage from National Public Radio.
