O'Connor for Chief Justice?

Maybe it's time for Arlen Specter to retire.

On Face the Nation, Specter said Sandra Day O'Connor should be nominated for chief justice of the Supreme Court.

"I think it would be very tempting if the president said to Justice O'Connor, 'You could help the country now,' " Mr. Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and a pivotal player in any confirmation hearings, said in an interview on the CBS program "Face the Nation." "She has received so much adulation that a confirmation proceeding would be more like a coronation, and she might be willing to stay on for a year or so."

Although Mr. Specter's seeming endorsement of the idea was highly speculative - Justice O'Connor, 75, has announced her retirement, while Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, has not stepped down - it was the clearest of his several recent signals that he plans to steer his own course as he oversees hearings on a replacement for Justice O'Connor, independent of the president and of his party's conservative base.

...Both Mr. Specter and Mr. Leahy said they were familiar with an account of a meeting that two senators, one from each party, had had with Justice O'Connor weeks before her retirement, in which they discussed a campaign to elevate her if Chief Justice Rehnquist does step down. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, described the same meeting to The Chicago Tribune last weekend, suggesting that Justice O'Connor had not objected. No one identified the senators.

"I did hear about it," Mr. Specter said, "that there had been senators who had made that suggestion to Justice O'Connor, and that the response that I heard was that she said she was flattered. That she didn't say no."

Describing what he called credible speculation, Mr. Specter said that before she retired, "there was some speculation in the intervening week that Justice O'Connor might be waiting to see what Chief Justice Rehnquist did, perhaps with the chance to become chief justice herself."

This is nuts.

If at one time O'Connor toyed with the idea of being chief justice, I think that door is closed.