While political pundits speculate about potential replacements for the retiring Justice Souter on the US Supreme Court, President Obama has already signalled his willingness to follow through on his campaign promise to select judges who he believes, in effect, will be ready to resort to systematic abuse of judicial review.
What’s the Matter with Empathy?, by Wendy Long.
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[When], for the first time in American history, a candidate for president announced that he would seek judges whose decision-making is premised explicitly upon partiality - rather than upon the impartiality that the law requires of a judge - it was so unprecedented and so outlandish that many thought it was just campaign talk. Maybe it was something that had worked for some swing-state focus group.
It wasn’t.
President Obama’s first appellate nominee, Judge David Hamilton of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, has a long résumé of activism that suggests clearly where his “empathy” lies.
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The court that reversed Judge Hamilton’s rulings, the Seventh Circuit, is the very court to which he has now been nominated. Judge Hamilton’s judicial approach - the Obama “empathy” approach - is the essence of judicial activism: He bases his rulings on his own personal values, beliefs, and empathy instead of on what the law actually says.
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That comment by Harry Reid today that he hopes Obama looks outside the judicial arena for Supreme Court candidates who are not judges, perhaps legislators instead just hit me upside the head like a brick. I can't believe he said that and I can't believe it's actually being considered.
ReplyDeletebeetlebabee, you might want to remember that Bush nominated Harriet Miers, who had no judicial experience. Humorous footnote: Reid was one of the first to offer support for her nomination.
ReplyDeletebeetlebabee - Not altogether unusual in the history of the court. Strategically for issues like same-sex marriage such a choice could be (you never know) a better deal for traditionalists than a stern judicial activist picked from the ranks of the lower courts.
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