Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship

This is about as unusual as it gets, so I thought we sould re-post this today.

The Raw Story Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship: (Full Article)

In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O'Connor 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.