26 May 2009
Legislating from the Bench
Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Constitution in Peril; Rejecting Herd Mentality; What's News .
Imagine a pastor guiding his congregation through his own philosophies and not bothering to use the scriptures as a touchstone for truth. A pastor needs to have a conviction gained through study and pondering of God and the truths that He teaches or that pastor has no business acting in that capacity. With the same concept in mind, imagine a judge who guides his/her court through his/her own philosophies, not bothering to use the Constitution as a touchstone for political truths. A judge needs to have a conviction through study and pondering that the Constitution embodies timeless political truths or that judge has no business acting in that capacity. Judges are to interpret law within the bounds legally set by the Constitution.
Activist judges, since FDR, have illegally tossed aside their duty and have been tossed to and fro with every wind of political doctrine and allowed our nation to become unanchored. In reading the selections I’ve shared of the article below, notice how the new Supreme Court nominee makes no reference to judging within the parameters of the Constitution but instead by personal whim according to her own experience. What she is saying is that a white man cannot judge properly and that is astonishing prejudice. Imagine a white man saying that about a Hispanic woman.Reverse prejudice is tearing this country apart.
We are a Republic which means we are to be governed by the rule of law and not the current opinion.
How brilliant of our president to pick a liberal who will do his biding by legislating from the bench that is someone many Republicans will fear to tackle because they will not want to be seen attacking women or Hispanics. And on it goes…
A Judge’s View of Judging Is on the Record
WASHINGTON — In 2001, Sonia Sotomayer, an appeals court judge, gave a speech declaring that the ethnicity and sex of a judge “may and will make a difference in our judging.”
In her speech, Judge Sotomayor questioned the famous notion — often invoked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her retired Supreme Court colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor — that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor, who is now considered to be near the top of President Obama’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees. . .
This month, for example, a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 that a “court of appeals is where policy is made.” She then immediately adds: “And I know — I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. O.K. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m — you know.” . . .
Republicans have signaled that they intend to put the eventual nominee under a microscope, and they say they were put on guard by Mr. Obama’s statement that judges should have “empathy,” a word they suggest could be code for injecting liberal ideology into the law.
Judge Sotomayor has given several speeches about the importance of diversity. But her 2001 remarks at Berkeley, which were published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, went further, asserting that judges’ identities will affect legal outcomes.
“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,” she said, for jurists who are women and nonwhite, “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”. . .
She also approvingly quoted several law professors who said that “to judge is an exercise of power” and that “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives.”
“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see,” she said.
Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor and an adviser to Mr. Obama, said Judge Sotomayor’s remarks were appropriate. Professor Ogletree said it was “obvious that people’s life experiences will inform their judgments in life as lawyers and judges” because law is more than “a technical exercise,” citing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous aphorism: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
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