Posted by
Bob Wood aka TrekTek on Sunday, May 10, 2009 5:37:31 PM
Lady Justice's Blindfold
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JUDICIAL dispassion - the ability to decide cases without being influenced by personal feelings or political preferences - is indispensable to the rule of law. So indispensable, in fact, that the one-sentence judicial oath required of every federal judge and justice contains no fewer than three expressions of it: "I . . . do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me . . . under the Constitution and laws of the United States, so help me God."
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And that is why President Obama's "empathy" standard is so disturbing, and has generated so much comment.
Time and again, Obama has called for judges who do not put their private political views aside when deciding cases. In choosing a replacement for Justice David Souter, the president says, he will seek not just "excellence and integrity," but a justice whose "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles," would be "an essential ingredient" in his jurisprudence. In an interview last year, he said he would look for judges "sympathetic" to those "on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless." |
To my thinking, this is where the liberal argument fails. The United States is a nation of laws, governed by the supreme law of the land - The United States Constitution. The law means what the law says. And laws are made by the elected representatives of the people.
In the liberal view, apparently also Obama's, the law means what a judge says it means - no matter how convoluted the judge's logic may be. The liberals have learned that in order to control our society, control of the courts is paramount. What the law says matters not. What good is equal protection under the law when we recognize "disadvantaged" classes of people. In this latter view, the individual and individual rights have no meaning. As a member of a "disadvantaged" class, one gains the advantage!
And where does it stop? Does it stop with our right to free speech? Or how about our right to keep and bear arms? Or our right to own property?
Our education system has completely failed to teach us the basics of our history so that we as a people know how we came to be the country that we were intended to be. Instead of teaching respect for the law, we are teaching anger management and conflict resolution.
Dr. Thomas Sowell explains how we are losing the meaning of the English language in How We're Killing Our 'Living Constitution'.
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This process of "interpreting" the Constitution (or legislation) to mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean, no matter how plainly the words say something else, has been called judicial activism.
As a result of widespread objections to this, that problem has been solved by redefining "judicial activism" to mean something different.
By the new definition, a judge who declares legislation that exceeds the authority of the legislature unconstitutional is called a "judicial activist."
The verbal virtuosity is breathtaking. With just a new meaning to an old phrase, reality is turned upside down. Those who oppose letting government actions exceed the bounds of the Constitution — justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — are now called "judicial activists." It is a verbal coup.
Politicians such as Sen. Patrick Leahy and law professors such as Cass Sunstein and many in the media measure how much of a judicial activist a judge is by how many laws that judge has declared unconstitutional. |
Michael Ramiriz at Investor's Business Daily depicts the coming Obama judicial appointments this way:
