Former Ohio Supreme Court Justice and lieutenant governor Maureen O’Connor is certainly not resting quietly in her retirement. Though she left her seat on the court in 2022 because of age limits, she is still active in matters such as redistricting and protecting the judiciary from politicization.

It’s easy to understand why that is important to her. When she was on the court, she repeatedly stood with the majority in rejecting clearly unfair and unconstitutional redistricting maps. For doing so, she faced insults and threats of impeachment from fellow Republicans — for not “acting like a Republican.”

“I wanted to say there’s no higher compliment to say that I’m not acting like a political figure,” O’Connor said during an interview with the Ohio Capital Journal. “Those letters just crystalized the thought of people who don’t understand that judges don’t have a constituency. If they bring their politics into the courtroom, they don’t deserve to wear the robe.”

It is a shame how few people appear to understand that, in this era.

To help them wrap their brains around it, O’Connor has joined the Alliance to Protect Judicial Independence — more than 40 former state chief justices — working to teach and safeguard “the constitutional balance envisioned by the Founders.”

O’Connor is right that when people become trained to see the judiciary as “just another political branch,” perhaps even aligned with, for example, the executive, it can lead to attacks.

“Such attacks undermine the integrity of the rule of law and threaten the promise of equal justice,” reads a letter released by the alliance.

“I think there’s a sense, when our leaders foment the idea that judges are biased, judges are corrupt, judges are not judging according to the law … it’s a trigger for people to maybe step it up, and that can take a lot of forms,” O’Connor told the Capital Journal.

Of course, the organization has other issues to work on, but this one — the idea to which certain politicians hope we will all buy in, that judges owe loyalty to a certain person or party in their decision-making –is critical. It has done considerable damage. Here’s hoping she and the rest of the alliance can turn the tide.