Obama's First Justice

Well Conservatives have already started working on Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court - a nomination he hasn't made yet, but one they know will be just awful. Carol Platt Liebau decries the possibility of Obama picking an empathetic justice, which she takes to me empathetic to unwed mothers and accused criminals. From this (and ignoring the rest of Obama's statement, she concludes that Obama wants a super legislator on the bench running roughshod over the constitution and decent Americans.

Instead, Obama wants a policymaker sitting on the Supreme Court – in fact, a super-lawmaker on steroids. He’s looking for a judge willing to engage in an enterprise that has nothing to do with the actual process of adjudication – that is, interpreting the laws that have been passed by a legislature and signed by an executive.

Of course the assumption Liebau makes here is that the conservative interpretation of the laws is the only reasonable one; the only way that a justice would rule in agreement with Kennedy or Ginsburg is if they were being essentially unreasonable. Empathy clouds their minds and they vote by something other than the law.

Poppycock. While I might strongly disagree with an Alito or a Scalia, I'm not going to pretend like they don't know the law. Nor am I going to pretend like they don't have legal rationales for why they vote the way they do; I simply disagree with their interpretation (or to be more precise, I agree with people who know far more about such issues than I do).

In other news, Kevin James suggests Daffy Duck as the ideal candidate for the Surpreme Court; largely because he is a minority, black, handicapped (speech impediment), and a perpetual victim. Because the only thing we liberals are looking for is minorities, not qualifications. Clearly this must be so because if we were interested in a qualified candidate we would select another White guy.