Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Recently retired Supreme Court jurist Sandra Day O’Connor slammed her own party for playing politics with the judiciary in a speech last Thursday at Georgetown University. According to NPR as transcribed by Raw Story, O’Connor described the Republicans’ works against the judicial system as the “beginnings” of a “dictatorship” in the United States, as “without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government, those rights and privileges would amount to nothing”. As O’Connor was reportedly a staunch partisan on the Court five years ago, the counterattack is striking. However, O’Connor is also the type of conservative who recognizes that the integrity of government institutions is more important than partisanship or ideology.