Sandra Day O'Connor Joins the Order of the Shrill!

Nina Totenberg reports:

The Raw Story | Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship: 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 correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.

Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O'onnor 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.

And then she took aim at former GOP house leader Tom DeLay... 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 status of 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 a 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 for punishing 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 experience 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 long 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.

Welcome, Justice O'Connor! We have reserved the Chaos Suite for you. You can pick up your robe... oh, I see you have your robe...

Comments

[jerry]

Perhaps we should have a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. O'Connor has spoken one part truth, but she is ignoring the rather large elephant she helped move in to the White House.

[ch2]

O'Connor ?

Her vote in Bush vs Gore still reeks.

That she met the fury of the monster she helped to birth is only poetic justice.

[Dale]

As to the recent accounts by Bruce Barlett, OConner, and others--
I don't know what the right response is. To lambast them for their laughably late criticisms of BushCo. (although OConner may not have been free to make such statements without resigning first. I don't know what restrains law and tradition put on serving Justices)

Or to praise them for their current frankness.

On the one hand we need all the prominant allies we can get to stop the drifing of our nation towards facism- or whatever we are calling this. On the other their conversion experiences may be a more strategic attempt to resurrect a moderate, reality based Republican alternative in the next presidential elections.

[otto]

Raging against judges is how you change the constitution and is indeed a permanent part of US politics. Changing the constitution by shouting is more common than formally amending it. O'Connor sounds like a Hoover judge, not realising the dominant political coalition has changed.

[Mike]

Hear! Hear! ch2.

She AND those other three (plus one) rogues on the the court who voted to sacrifice UNIVERSALLY recognized LITTLE D democratic principles AND norms on the altar of THEIR ideological 'proclivities' OUGHT to have been impeached, given a fair trial, and THEN strung up--er, REASSIGNED--to the nearest federal detention facility...

IF you want to know MY opinion.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/09thur1.html?ex=1299560400&en=d5b92cee94d0211a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 9, 2006

The Death of the Intelligence Panel

The wrenching debate in the 1970's over the abuse of presidential power produced two groundbreaking reforms aimed at preventing a president from using war or broader claims of national security to trample Americans' rights.

One was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership. They endured for a quarter of a century — until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.

The Senate panel has become so paralyzingly partisan that it could not even manage to do its basic job this week and look into President Bush's warrantless spying on Americans' international e-mail and phone calls. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman, said Tuesday that there would be no investigation. Instead, the committee's Republicans voted to create a subcommittee that is supposed to get reports from the White House on any future warrantless surveillance.

It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control. This new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving the spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.

The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him....

[Alan]

Doesn't anyone recall how she was quoted "this is terrible!" when it appeared that Gore was going to win in Florida. Then went on to vote the majority in Bush vs. Gore, one of the biggest 3 Supreme Court travesties in history.

Before she gets any kudos, she shold be asked about that.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/l10abuse.html

A Blank Check for the President?

To the Editor:

"The Death of the Intelligence Panel" accurately portrays the way the Bush administration has eviscerated the separation of powers.

Not only has the Senate failed to check the virtually unilateral exercise of executive authority to conduct domestic surveillance and to detain people indefinitely by designating them enemy combatants, but the world's greatest deliberative body has also aided and abetted this power's invocation, a phenomenon trenchantly illustrated by the domestic surveillance debacle and passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

Carl Tobias
Richmond, Va., March 9, 2006
The writer is a law professor at the University of Richmond.

[John Emerson]

I'll put Sandra on my long "Where the fuck were you when it made any difference?" list forthwith. I have no confidence that the situation is not irremediable, and I'm sick of people like O'Connor. I read bits of her autobiography and she seemed complacent and aggressively unaware of a lot of things.

[Tony]

I've come to lay all the blame for the way our government is run, and the way people grudgingly accept this, in one place:

I blame the Sopranos.

It may be hyperbolic and a little nuts, but people will hear you out if you lead with this line. Just predict that people forty years from now will look at the Sopranos and ask themselves, "WTF? Why did they like this show so much?" And watch the idea sink in.

[wcw]

Count me among the "Fuck Sandra '5-4' O'Connor" crowd. "Against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning?" It is to laugh, sadly and knowingly, into your beer.

And the horse she rode in on.

[Barry]

"(although OConner may not have been free to make such statements without resigning first. I don't know what restrains law and tradition put on serving Justices)"

Judging from Salia, only courtesy and dignity restrain a serving justice's public remarks.

['As You Know' Bob]

O'Connor now thinks that Republican officials have Gone Too Far in criticizing the judicial branch?

I am reminded of the death of William Rehnquist.

Justice Rehnquist had been fighting cancer for years, but he had been saying - repeatedly and publically - that he was beating it, and had no plans to retire. And suddenly, he died.

My theory: Rehnquist was watching the news from New Orleans.

And he realized with a sinking heart that GEORGE BUSH is the man that he destroyed the reputation of the Supreme Court to install in office.

And his heartbreak for his country and for what he has inflicted upon it is what killed him.

May he rest in peace - but it is up to us to deal with the consequences of Rehnquist's and O'Connor's terrible decision.

[liberal]

'As You Know' Bob wrote, "I am reminded of the death of William Rehnquist."

Now that you mention him...Rehnquist actually spoke at great length (much greater than O'Conner, AFAICT) about the threat to the judiciary. What I don't know is whether he was willing to point out the source of the threat (viz, right-wing Republicans) like S O'C was.

[Bradley]

I'm excited about the comments she made. Regardless of her decision in Bush v. Gore, she's seen the light now. I think it's a sign that most moderates are coming around now and seeing the dastardly effects of the Republican regime.

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