Sandy Baby, The Supreme Court Isn’t A Part Of The State Department

31 Oct, 2003 by John Hawkins

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At an awards dinner at Atlanta, Sandra Day O’Connor made statements that should be condemned by any American who claims to care about the Constitution. Here’s what O’Connor said…

“The impressions we create in this world are important, and they can leave their mark,” O’Connor said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

…O’Connor told the audience, according to the Atlanta paper, the U.S. judicial system generally gives a favorable impression worldwide, “but when it comes to the impression created by the treatment of foreign and international law and the United States court, the jury is still out.”

She cited two recent Supreme Court cases that illustrate the increased willingness of U.S. courts to take international law into account in its decisions.

In 2002, she said, the high court regarded world opinion when it ruled executing the mentally retarded to be unconstitutional.

American diplomats, O’Connor added, filed a court brief in that case about the difficulties their foreign missions faced because of U.S. death penalty practices.

More recently, the Supreme Court relied partly on European Court decisions in its decision to overturn the Texas anti-sodomy law.

“I suspect,” O’Connor said, according to the Atlanta daily, “that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues.”

Doing so, she added, “may not only enrich our own country’s decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression.”

The opinions of international and foreign courts should have no more to do with Sandra Day O’Connor’s rulings than what she ate for breakfast or what the weather was like that day. The idea that the Supreme Court should be making decisions based on the “all important good impression” that it will leave on other nations runs absolutely counter to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Moreover, the last thing a Supreme Court Justice should ever be thinking is, “Well, I think the people of Europe would prefer that we rule this way, so that’s the way we’re going to go”.

I’m telling you folks, we DESPERATELY need to get some more Supreme Court justices in office who are serious about sticking to the Constitution, as opposed to judges like Sandra Day O’Connor & Stephen Breyer (who has made comments similar to the ones O’Connor did here), who are making things up as they go along and calling it “constitutional law”.