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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (483829)	5/28/2009 11:17:37 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1574212

RULE OF LAWYERS "It's not the rule of law, it's the rule of lawyers: That's the central message conveyed by President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a judge of the Second Circuit federal appeals court, to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court next October," Andrew C. McCarthy writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com). "Obama and the lawyers in his administration are fond of invoking the rule of law. Yet that golden standard stands on the conceit, honored more in the breach than in the observance, that 'we are a nation of laws, not of men.' It holds that there is an objective corpus of law - of the community's reasoned consensus, shorn of passion, fear or favor - under which we've agreed to be governed and to which those chosen to represent us owe their fidelity. It's a nice ideal. Increasingly, though, our real governing standard is the one made infamous by the legendary litigator Roy Cohn: 'Don't tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.' "Our ideal of judging was perhaps best explained by John Roberts during his 2005 confirmation hearings. The judge is like an umpire, Roberts mused. The umpire calls balls and strikes; he doesn't design or alter the rules of the game. That's how it's supposed to work. The judge's courtroom is the level playing field where even the visiting team can win if the law - the objective law - is on its side. Sure, the crowd and the local paper will root, root, root for the home team. The rules, however, don't have a rooting interest. Justice is blind. The umpire is there to see that justice is done - not manufactured. "The president doesn't view the world that way. He wants the umpire to pick winners and losers, not simply to preside over a fair fight - 'fair,' in this context, meaning a fight under rules agreed upon before the game gets started."