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O'Connor Blasts Republican Party

Posted by on March 10, 2006 at 11:51 AM

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took aim at Senator Cornyn (R-TX), Tom DeLay (R-TX), and basically the entire Republican Party during a speech at Georgtown University yesterday evening.

You can listen to the NPR report, here. Here's a snippit or two:

O'Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms [...]

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 might be a connection between violence against judges and decisions 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 judges 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 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 strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their prefered 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.

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