Conservatives freaking out over implications of Souter stepping down.

jefferson_dem

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Fri May-01-09 09:03 AM
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Conservatives freaking out over implications of Souter stepping down.

Edited on Fri May-01-09 09:03 AM by jefferson_dem

Good stuff right here, from the neocon NRO.

Filling the Souter Seat

Some initial thoughts on President Obama�s opportunity to appoint a successor to Justice Souter:

1. Obama�s own record and rhetoric make clear that he will seek left-wing judicial activists who will indulge their passions, not justices who will make their rulings with dispassion. As I discussed more fully in this essay:

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.

2. Souter has been a terrible justice, but you can expect Obama�s nominee to be even worse. The Left is clamoring for �liberal lions� who will redefine the Constitution as a left-wing goodies bag. Consider some of their leading contenders, like Harold Koh (champion of judicial transnationalism and transgenderism), Massaschusetts governor Deval Patrick (a racialist extremist and judicial supremacist), and Cass Sunstein (advocate of judicial invention of a �second Bill of Rights� on welfare, employment, and other Nanny State mandates). Or Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose shenanigans in trying to bury the firefighters� claims in Ricci v. DeStefano triggered an extraordinary dissent by fellow Clinton appointee Jos� Cabranes (and the Supreme Court�s pending review of the ruling). Or Elena Kagan, who led the law schools� opposition to military recruitment on their campuses, who used remarkably extreme rhetoric��a profound wrong� and �a moral injustice of the first order��to condemn the federal law on gays in the military that was approved in 1993 by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, and who received 31 votes against her confirmation as Solicitor General. Or Seventh Circuit judge Diane Wood, a fervent activist whose extreme opinions in an abortion case managed to elicit successive 8-1 and 9-0 slapdowns by the Supreme Court.

3. Don�t be fooled by the false claims that we have a conservative Supreme Court. The Court has a working majority of five living-constitutionalists. Four of them�Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer�consistently engage in liberal judicial activism, and a fifth, Kennedy, frequently does. As a result, the Court is markedly to the left of the American public on a broad range of issues. Indeed, in coming years, Souter�s replacement may well provide the fifth vote for:

� the imposition of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage;

� stripping �under God� out of the Pledge of Allegiance and completely secularizing the public square;

� the continued abolition of the death penalty on the installment plan;

� selectively importing into the Court�s interpretation of the American Constitution the favored policies of Europe�s leftist elites;

� further judicial micromanagement of the government�s war powers; and

� the invention of a constitutional right to human cloning.

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http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzhmZTkyN2YwYjhkODI3ZDAxOGQ2ZGE0ZTc1N2UwZDI=