Dictatorships flourish when governments are allowed to interfere with the judiciary, she says.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported on Friday that retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has launched a fusillade against against the leadership of her own party over the issue of judicial reform. In a speech at George Washington University, O’Connor said that Republicans have incited violence against judges and that their efforts to dismantle the independent judiciary are the first steps in the path toward dictatorship.
O’Connor prohibited audio or video recording when she spoke last Thursday, March 9, 2006, so all we have is a transcript of Totenberg’s report on Friday’s Morning Edition:
[O’Connor] 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.
Listen to the NPR reporter here
“launched a fusilage against against the leadership”
What’s a ”fusilage”? A fuselage is the main body of an aircraft. A fusillade is a broadside, volley or a salvo. I wonder if that’s what you meant?
Regards
Sorry, synaptical misfire — fusillade.
I don’t think DeLay hates the judiciary per se, just judges with a post-Enlightenment view of the world. Robespierre would be probably be viewed quite favorably by Mr. DeLay, were he to be nominated to the SCOTUS.
Was not The key vote that placed George W. Bush in the white house in the first place cast by Justice O’Connor?
Could this last be a sign, belated by a couple of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND UNTOLD BILLIONS OF WASTED AND STOLEN TAXPAYER DOLLARS into the insatiable pit of REPUBLICAN AND RULING ELITIST GREED, of “buyer’s remorse”, or is it just an attempt to join Ike on a past tense pedestal ABOVE THE SEWAGE that that KEY VOTE has unleashed upon the entire world?
Just askin’….
Hard to say who the decisive vote was, oldgringo, but you have a point – O’Connor helped put this doorknob in the Oval Office. Now she regrets it. Age, sometimes but not always, brings wisdom.