Judge O'Connor warns of 'dictatorship'

HOLY SHIT!

Newly retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took on conservative Republican critics of the courts in a speech Thursday. She told an audience at Georgetown University that Republican proposals, and their sometimes uncivil tone, pose a danger to the independence of the judiciary, and the freedoms of all Americans.

There's no transcript, which is tragic. But NPR was there. Here's a rush of Nina Totenberg's item on it.
Or, if you don't feel like clicking:

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.


...snip...

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.

He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." ~ Murrow