Don't condemn the messenger
Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of
dictatorship
RAW STORY
Published: March 10, 2006
Via NPR. Rush transcript by RAW STORY. Listen to the audio report here.
Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O?Connor
no longer faces that obligation. Yesterday, the retired justice
criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said they challenge
the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. O?Connor?s
speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR?s
legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.
Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O?Connor
said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a
direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O?Connor began by conceding
that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or
governors, as she put it ?really, really angry.? But, she continued, if
we don?t make them mad some of the time we probably aren?t doing our jobs
as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion
that we won?t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The
nation?s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent
judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of
government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But, said
O?Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don?t
protect judicial independence, people do.
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And then she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay. She didn?t
name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the
conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out
after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo
case. This, said O?Connor, was after the federal courts had applied
Congress? onetime only statute about Schiavo as it was written. Not, said
O?Connor, as the congressman might have wished it were written. This
response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O?Connor,
her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the
courts.
It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are
increasing. It doesn?t help, she said, when a high-profile senator
suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and
decisions that the senator disagrees with. She didn?t name him, but it
was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia
judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in
Illinois murdered in the judge?s home. O?Connor observed that there have
been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms,
recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the
courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending
judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are
not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with.
I, said O?Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan
reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former
communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has
allowed dictatorship to flourish, O?Connor said we must be ever-vigilant
against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their
preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls
into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding
these beginnings.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Retired_Supreme_Court_Justice_hits_attacks_
0310.html
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Yours truly,
The Lone Weasel
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