A little browsing in Bloglines led me to this post:

My Left Wing :: A Stretch No More: Crossing the Godwin Divide (Part I)

…which led me to another blogger, Steven D’s post, “We Live Under A Dictatorship,” which is worth a good, hard read. Another link on the first blog led me somewhere familiar:

The Guardian: Jonathan Raban/Dictatorship is the danger

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.

I blogged about this (actually, “quicklinked” it) in March, too, where I said:

ISTEN TO THIS. Listen to this. You need to listen to this. God bless Nina Totenberg, and God bless Sandra Day O’Connor, and God bless the Constitution of the United States of America, which as we’ve known for a while, is under attack from the Right.

Nina Tottenberg, the only journalist who reported on Justice O’Connor’s speech, filed her report at NPR, and you can listen to it here. LISTEN. You must listen to this.

Raw Story has a more complete transcript, also.

Incidentally, I met Jonathan Raban several times in a travel context when he was living in Seattle. He won’t remember, I was a peon at the time, but it was odd to encounter a familiar name.