Well, we don't exactly need sources in high places to tell us which side of the Congressional aisle she's talking about. Are you paying attention Bill Frist and Tom Delay?
Snippets:
" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court will likely lead to a tumultuous fight in Congress over her replacement, said yesterday there is so much "antipathy" among elected politicians toward federal judges that she worries about the future of an independent judiciary.
"I'm pretty old you know, and in all the years of my life, I don't think I've ever seen relations as strained as they are now between the judiciary and some members of Congress," O'Connor said. "It makes me very sad to see it."
O'Connor noted that Ukraine's supreme court recently overturned that country's presidential election after finding rampant vote fraud.
"I thought that was a transforming moment in the success of our efforts to promote the rule of law and the role of an independent judiciary," she said. "And yet in our country today, we're seeing efforts to prevent that — a desire not to have an independent judiciary."
Though O'Connor was appointed by one of the nation's most popular conservative presidents, she has often riled religious conservatives. She cast the deciding vote in a ruling upholding Roe v. Wade, the landmark case legalizing abortion.
Earlier this year, she joined in a 5-4 ruling that said the display of the Ten Commandments in two Kentucky courthouses violated the constitutional mandate for separation of church and state.
O'Connor said yesterday that the lack of such separation has had "violent consequences" in so many other countries, "it's hard to see why we should give that up in the face of the success that we've had."
On states' rights, O'Connor said she has always viewed state governments as laboratories. "Let them try things and see how it works," she said, citing California's effort to legalize marijuana for medical purposes as a good example. She dissented on a Supreme Court ruling that said the federal government's outright marijuana ban trumped California's law.
When O'Connor attended law school, only 3 percent of law students nationwide were women, she said. Now it's more than 50 percent.
She said she was always a little reluctant about the role-model status of being the first woman on the Supreme Court. "I never expected to be that person and was pretty scared to take it on," O'Connor said, "because it's a very hard job and I didn't want to mess it up because it would make it harder for other women to follow."
Women are more than 50% in law schools, but we remain a very long way from that number in the highest offices in the land. O'Connor was appointed to the High Court in 1981, a year that followed a tremendous amount of feminist activism.
Who would have believed in 1981 that after all these years we would still have an almost exclusively male body making decisions about women's reproductive freedom or lack thereof?
Tags: supreme court
