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

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

This is largely the problem that they're looking to solve with the 'empathy' argument.

You're exactly right. It is not the job of the judiciary to decide if a policy is a good idea or not. It is their job to decide if it is legal or not. We already have two branches of the government who are tasked with deciding whether or not a policy is a good idea. (and in CA, throw The People into that group...)

It isn't the CA Supreme Court's job to decide if it is a good idea to amend the CA Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, so they didn't address the issue. They only ruled that it was legal to amend the constitution to prohibit gay marriage.