Following on from the "...Rubicon":

Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday March 13, 2006
The Guardian

Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after
24 years
on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards
dictatorship if the
party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.
In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National
Public Radio
and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders
whose
repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said,
be
contributing to a climate of violence against judges.

Ms O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan as the first woman supreme court
justice,
declared: "We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the
judiciary."
She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist
countries as
lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of
degeneration
before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by
avoiding these
beginnings."

In her address to an audience of corporate lawyers on Thursday, Ms O'Connor
singled out
a warning to the judiciary issued last year by Tom DeLay, the former Republican
leader in
the House of Representatives, over a court ruling in a controversial "right to
die" case.

After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri
Schiavo,
removed from life support, Mr DeLay said: "The time will come for the men
responsible for
this to answer for their behaviour."

Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo
case, and
called for more scrutiny of "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable
judiciary that
thumbed their nose at Congress and the president".

Such threats, Ms O'Connor said, "pose a direct threat to our constitutional
freedom", and
she told the lawyers in her audience: "I want you to tune your ears to these
attacks ... You
have an obligation to speak up.

"Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence - people do,"
the retired
supreme court justice said.

She noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the
situation was
not helped by a senior senator's suggestion that there might be a connection
between the
violence against judges and the decisions they make.

The senator she was referring to was John Cornyn, a Bush loyalist from Texas,
who made
his remarks last April, soon after a judge was shot dead in an Atlanta courtroom
and the
family of a federal judge was murdered in Illinois.

Senator Cornyn said: "I don't know if there is a cause and effect connection,
but we have
seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country ... And I
wonder whether
there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some
occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to
the
public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in
violence."

Although appointed by a Republican, Ms O'Connor voted with the supreme court's
liberals
on some divisive issues, including abortion, making her a frequent target for
criticism
from the right. After announcing that she intended to retire last year at the
age of 75, she
was replaced in February this year by Samuel Alito, who is generally regarded as
being
more consistently conservative.

In her speech, Ms O'Connor said that if the courts did not occasionally make
politicians
mad they would not be doing their jobs, and their effectiveness "is premised on
the notion
that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts".