Judging Sotomayor?

[unixronin]

Much has been written, on both sides, about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. President Obama has repeatedly said that he feels the Supreme Court needs her “empathy”. Sotomayor herself has said on many occasions that “a wise Latina woman [...] would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” when it comes to judging the law.

I have grave reservations about this nomination, and a few minutes ago, I realized how to distil out the central essence of why.

You see, the United States is a Constitutional republic, a nation of law, and the duty of the United States Supreme Court is to be the final judge and arbiter of the nations laws and their rectitude. It is the duty of the Supreme Court’s Justices to make their judgements as fairly, as correctly, and as objectively as they possibly can. Their responsibility is not to judge the ethnic sensitivity of the plaintiff or the hardships faced by the defendant; it is to judge the fairness, the correctness, and the Constitutional soundness of the applicable law itself. If the Supreme Court cannot be objective, it cannot properly discharge its duties and responsibilities.

Yet, our President is nominating to the United States Supreme Court a woman whose strongest and most vital qualification for the position — or so he tells us — is precisely that she is not objective.

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The Supreme Court is not supposed to wander around "kicking the shit out of things." It's supposed to keep our government working Constitutionally.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of "things" involving unconstitutional acts of the government. Like illegal wiretaps. Unlawful searches and seizures. Establishment of religion.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The problem here is that the Supreme Court does not properly have the authority to engage such issues proactively. It is reactive; it must wait for a case to appear before it.

I have often considered that, were a miracle to happen that suddenly placed me in the position of the President, one of my first actions would be to convene a committee of Constitutional scholars with a mandate to review major acts of Congress and the White House, including executive orders, and evaluate them for constitutionality, starting at the present day and working backwards. The end goal would, of course, be to purge the body of US law of such things as civil forfeiture and warrantless searches, terminate the illegal wiretap programs, and in general restore compliance with the Constitution and the legal presumption of innocence.

Yes, some of this would make law enforcement's job harder. But in that regard I tend to agree somewhat with William Whitelaw, who would tell law enforcement every time they came to him asking for more powers that they were a bunch of whiners if they didn't think they could do their jobs with the powers they already had.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

"The problem here is that the Supreme Court does not properly have the authority to engage such issues proactively. It is reactive; it must wait for a case to appear before it."

Although some cases, such as Padilla, have entered the appeal process and . . . come up short. Imprisonment without trial or access to a lawyer . . .

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are difficult cases that pop up from time to time. But to try to "fix" the problems by throwing laws at them and changing the definitions to let you play by different rules is, in the long run, worse than accepting that your hands are tied for now. However much you [generic you] dislike being unable to pass the bar ands obtain a conviction on someone you're convinced is dirty, you cannot simply adopt a policy of moving the bar. That throws the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah, OK, so you convicted that guy you really wanted to convict; but if you keep on getting convictions that way, you eventually reach a point where everyone is guilty of something because you've lowered the bar so far, and then nobody respects the law any more because your courts have become guilty-if-charged kangaroo courts.