Legal Commentary

Obama's potential judicial appointments

By Beldar

The rest of the article is definitely worth reading too, but in two concise paragraphs, Ed Whelan gives us the essential things we need to know about what kind of federal judges a President Obama would appoint (emphasis Ed's):

Although Obama has served in the Senate for barely three years, he has already established a record on judicial nominations and constitutional law that comports with his 2007 ranking by the National Journal as the most liberal of all 100 senators. Obama voted against the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, and he even joined in the effort to filibuster the Alito nomination. In explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama opined that deciding the "truly difficult" cases requires resort to "one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy." In short, "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart." No clearer prescription for lawless judicial activism is possible.

Indeed, in setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, Obama has explicitly declared: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old ? and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics.

If you like your constitutional law bold, sweeping, and thoroughly disconnected from anything actually written down in the Constitution or imagined by its Framers, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you like your law served up by a court instead of by Congress or a state legislature, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you want vast and mysterious power concentrated in a handful of unelected judges whose behind-closed-doors deliberations will turn their own policy preferences into holy writ, changeable only through constitutional amendment (or a thorough overhaul of SCOTUS membership and then its recent precedents), then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you see stare decisis as a ratchet wrench that only permits torque in the direction "lefty-loosey," then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you want federal courts to disrespect and ride roughshod over their state-court counterparts, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you want a heavy thumb on the defendants' side of the scales of justice, with no counterbalance for victims' rights or the public interest, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you want even our foreign policy and the Global War on Terror micromanaged by the federal judiciary, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks. If you want American law to kowtow to and adopt wholesale from judges and courts you've never even heard of that sit in Brussels, The Hague, or Geneva, then you'll like Pres. Obama's judicial picks.

And if you're not satisfied with a Constitution that (in the words of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy) merely treats "liberty" as "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," and you're not even quite satisfied with a "living, breathing Constitution" ? well then, by golly, you'll just love the rip-roarin', snot-snortin', tap-dancin' Constitution as imposed on us all by Pres. Obama's judicial picks. God save the United States from that "Honorable" Court.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on March 08, 2008 (boomark / email).