Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Supreme Court, All Right or All Wrong? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (2430)	5/28/2009 1:16:58 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3029

Debate on Sotomayor both pro and con roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com Selected essay - The Heart of the Matter Kathryn Jean Lopez Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist. What does this tell us about President Obama and the Supreme Court? Believe a man when he talks empathy. In 2007, in a speech before Planned Parenthood, Senator Barack Obama cited “empathy” as an important prerequisite for any Supreme Court nominee. “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,” he said. True to his word, we’re all drowning in this empathy framework today. Republican senators should run with the Obama empathy standard because he also said in that same speech that empathy will be the deciding factor in only about 5 percent of cases before the court, and that those are “the cases that really count.” He said that in those 5 percent of the cases, what you’ve got to look at what is in a justice’s heart. What is the justice’s “broader vision of what America should be”? So let’s do that with Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Is the heart of this jurist the Constitution or is it liberal activism? Senators ought to explore this during the Judiciary Committee hearings. If nothing else, this exercise will be an education in what a liberal wants on the court. As the left lines up to “Confirm Her” (as the National Organization of Women is calling its Sotomayor campaign), the answer looks to be: a liberal activist who can’t be opposed because she’s a Hispanic “she.” That’s not good enough. President Obama and his nominee should be held to a standard very different from empathy, a standard that the president actually mentioned during Judge Sotomayor’s White House announcement: “A judge’s job is to interpret, not make, law.” Judge Sotomayor said today that “I firmly believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights.” But in what has become a much-watched YouTube video, Judge Sotomayor has told us that policy is made in the courts. Perhaps the most important 5 percent of the cases before the court don’t involve basic rights? There are contradictions here and it is the Senate’s duty not to gloss over them. These court nomination battles should focus on justice, not race and gender and empathy. As Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont and Judiciary Committee chairman, calls for bipartisanship, bear in mind that being loyal stewards of the Constitution is not partisan. -- Another selection (by Richard A. Epstein) "...But the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is hopelessly divisive because her term of office has earned her many detractors. In large measure, his choice springs from his flawed judicial philosophy which gives pride of place to those attributes that in the long run do not matter at all. I am never quite sure what empathy means anyhow in dealing with a legal dispute. Both sides have strong human interests and empathy for the one side could easily be treated as a form of indifference, perhaps even disrespect for the other. Or it could be treated as a code word for some form of favoritism based on a set of personal characteristics of race, sex and age that are usually orthogonal to the merits of a case. Long ago in dealing with corrective justice, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics insisted that justice depended not on who was rich or poor, or even who was a good or bad person, but on the conduct of the two parties relative to each other. The point of his observation was not to explain the grounds on which cases should be decided, but to make sure that extraneous considerations were not allowed to intrude into a dispute..."