Kansas City, Mo. ? Other branches of government — including the presidency — might not appreciate decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, but they don’t have the power to usurp them, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said Friday.

O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, was in Kansas City to accept the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award at the 53rd annual birthday luncheon for the nation’s 33rd president.

In her keynote address, O’Connor said a 1952 steel seizure case, Youngstown v. Sawyer, is a prime illustration of the Supreme Court’s independence.

In that case, President Truman ordered the government to take over most U.S. steel mills because of a labor dispute that threatened to shut the mills down. The U.S. military was struggling in the Korean war, and Truman argued that closing the mills would threaten national security because steel was imperative in the manufacture of weapons and munitions.

Though four of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Truman, and a couple of others on the bench were the president’s friends, the court ruled that Truman did not have the constitutional authority to take over the mills.

“Our system of government is one of delegated authority, and separation of powers,” O’Connor said. “By their ruling in the steel seizure case, President Truman’s appointees proved their friendship, not by siding with the president for personal reasons, but by fulfilling their duty to decide each case as impartially as possible, as members of the second branch of government — in short, as members of a truly independent judiciary.”

More recently, federal judges have come under fire by some members of Congress who were upset with the court’s failure to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. Schiavo, 41, who had been on life support since suffering brain damage in 1990, died March 31 after her feeding tube was removed.

O’Connor did not discuss the Schiavo case or any other current cases before the court in her address Friday.