President Obama wasn't the only high-profile critic of the United States Supreme Court for its ruling in the Citizens United case. Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote a 2003 decision the law reversed, gave a speech at Georgetown University Law Center a few days ago.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor did not sound happy on Tuesday about the Supreme Court's big campaign finance decision last week. It repudiated a major part of a ruling Justice O'Connor helped write before her retirement from the court in 2006, and it complicated her recent efforts to do away with judicial elections.
'Gosh,' she said, 'I step away for a couple of years and there's no telling what's going to happen.'
O'Connor feels the ruling could further jeopardize the integrity of judicial elections. Electing judges -- the norm in many states -- is a practice she's argued in recent years should be undone. What is not understandable is the criticism of the criticism. Tunku Varadarajan, writing for the Daily Beast, calls Obama's remark unseemly, as if the Court were not just another branch of government.
-- Monica Potts
