- Update 5/27/09 - The airwaves and cyberwaves are deluged with commentary on Justice Sotomayor. (Note, for example Michelle Malkin's excellent column). Jonah Goldberg makes a sound, succinct and unanswerable point when he says, [my bolding]
Why make this complicated?
President Obama prefers
Supreme Court justices who will violate their oath of office. And he
hopes Sonia Sotomayor is the right Hispanic woman for the job. Here’s
the oath Supreme Court justices must take:
“I, (name), do
solemnly swear (or affirm) 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 as (title) under the Constitution and laws of
the United States. So help me God.”
Contrast that with Obama’s
insistence that the “quality of empathy, of understanding and
identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” is the key qualification
for a Supreme Court justice. . .
Goldberg ends his column this way:
. . . who says conservatives are against judicial empathy? I, for one, am all for it. I’m for empathy for the party most deserving of justice before the Supreme Court, within the bounds of the law and Constitution. If that means siding with a poor black man, great. If that means siding with a rich white one, that’s great too. The same holds for gays and gun owners, single mothers and media conglomerates. We should all rejoice when justices fulfill their oaths and give everyone a fair hearing, even if that’s now out of fashion in the age of Obama.
Me: Well said! To argue differently is to be perverse.
- (Original post) - Wintery Knight has posted "Everything You Need to Know about the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) Pick. It's a magnificent post with lots of links and quotes. Highly recommended.
For continuing coverage, keep checking National Review's Bench Memos.