Dictatorship is the danger, Reagan-appointed supreme court
justice voices her fears over attacks on US de
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The Heron's Latest Catch
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1729350,00.html
March 13, 2006
Dictatorship
is the danger, Reagan-appointed supreme court justice voices her fears
over attacks on US democracy
Jonathan Raban
Monday March 13, 2006
The Guardian
Linking the words "America" and "dictatorship" is a daily staple of
leftwing blogs, which thrive on the idea that Bush administration
policies since 9/11 are taking the country ever closer to totalitarian
rule. Liberal fears that democracy is endangered by Republicans in
Congress are so widespread, so endemic to the jittery political climate
in the US, that they hardly bear repeating. It'll surprise no one to
learn that another voice was added to the chorus last Thursday, warning
that recent attacks on the American judiciary were putting the
democratic fabric in jeopardy and were the first steps down the
treacherous path to dictatorship. What is surprising—more than that,
electrifying—is that the voice belonged to Sandra Day O'Connor, who
retired a few weeks ago from the supreme court. O'Connor is a
Republican and a Reagan nominee. Regarded as the "swing vote" on the
court, she swung the presidential election to George Bush in 2000.
Equally surprising is that O'Connor's speech to an audience of lawyers
at Georgetown University was attended by just one reporter, the
diligent legal correspondent for National Public Radio, Nina Totenberg.
No transcript or recording of the speech has been made available, so we
have only Totenberg's notes to go on. But—assuming they are
accurate—the notes are political dynamite.
O'Connor's voice was "dripping with sarcasm", according to Totenberg,
as she "took aim at former House GOP [Republican] leader Tom DeLay. She
didn't name him, but 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.
"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 the senator disagrees with."
Then she spoke the D-word. "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
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."
Delivered by someone who was, until recently, one of the nine guardians
of the US constitution, these are spine-chilling opinions, and you
might have thought they'd have been all over the papers the next day.
Not so. I happened to catch Totenberg's NPR report last Friday, and
have been following up references to it. A cable TV talkshow and a
handful of blogs have mentioned Totenberg's piece: otherwise there's
been a disquieting silence, as if the former justice had laid an
unsavoury egg and had best be politely ignored.
Why did O'Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts? Why
was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America
is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate
oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O'Connor
believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the
world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far
have the dubious character of the scores of unverifiable leaks that
have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush
administration. It's unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to
leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to
whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it's hard to avoid the
inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled
democracy it purports to describe.
Death threats to judges figured importantly in O'Connor's speech, with
good reason. Last year, an Illinois federal judge found her husband and
mother murdered, and a Georgia state judge was shot dead in his
courtroom. Within days, Senator John Cornyn of Texas mused: "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 and builds up to the point where some people engage in
violence." DeLay, speaking of the judges who had ruled that Schiavo be
allowed to die, said: "The time will come for the men responsible for
this to answer for their behaviour."
These are peculiar times, and when Republican politicians appear to
endorse the killing of judges who make rulings of which they
disapprove, it's maybe understandable that a distinguished judge like
Sandra Day O'Connor, expressing views calculated to enrage Republican
politicians, might sensibly look to a small podium with a weak sound
system for fear of being heard too clearly by the likes of Cornyn and
DeLay.
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