I Need to Stop Relying on Labels

At first I thought I must be going blind or crazy. I had just found myself in agreement with a dissent written by Justice O'Connor with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas.This had to be some sort of a trick.
It has come to me, though, that it should have been the conservative justices who voted for the Fifth Amendment and against allowing government to jack someone's property for the chance to make a buck on it. What doesn't make sense is for conservative politicians to be voting against the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
We get used to the labels being given to things. We start giving credence to those labels, and then we get confused because, after all, the labels are really meaningless. More and more it would seem to be the conservative politicians who are attempting to reinterpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights while reviling their opponents as unpatriotic.
Today Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement and I find myself thinking... how bad would it be if we had another like Chief Justice Rehnquist on the court? How cool would it be to have another independent free-thinker like Justice O'Connor?
Today Crabby Old Lady writes about the... inevitable?... impact of Kelo v. City of New London on the elderly. In California where Proposition 13 was implemented almost thirty years ago, the longer one has owned their property the more at risk they are of having their property taken on any pretext. Hmmm... what demographic is most likely to have owned the same property since 1977?
I was surprised that the conservatives on the court dissented from the Kelo opinion. Forty years ago I would have expected nothing else. I need to stop relying on labels.