Saturday, March 11, 2006

Retired Justice O'Connor: Warns of Dictatorship


Pix courtesy of The Hollywood Liberal.
RAWStory: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some GOP leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O’Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents, Congress or governors, as she put it “really, really angry. But, 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. She said "The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly that w/o an independent judiciary to protect individual rts from the other branches of govt 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." She also took shots w/o naming them by name at GOP wingnuts Tom DeLay & John Cornyn. But here are the money quotes: "I 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, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." Nice try Sandra Day O'Hypocrite... but I think you are a day late and dollar short. Didja suddenly wake up and realize in a horrorifying panic that you hand-picked this crazy fuck dictator in 2000? Feeling buyers' regret now Sandy? Good. Join the rest of us who have a conscience. We're all shaking like a cat shitting razorblades, too.
Posted by Tina :: 12:48 AM :: 6 Comments:

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