[Vision2020] Here comes the Judge

Tue Oct 28 07:34:47 PDT 2008

Judge This
Obama and the law.

By Thomas Sowell

One of the biggest and most long-lasting "change" to expect if Barack
Obama becomes president of the United States is in the kinds of
federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as
well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom
will have lifetime tenure.

Sen. Obama has stated very clearly what kinds of Supreme Court
justices he wants — those with "the empathy to understand what it's
like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Like so many things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don't
stop and think — and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really
want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the
facts and the law?

If the case involves a white man versus a black woman, should the
judge decide that case differently than if both litigants are of the
same race or sex?

The kind of criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten
three young men at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that
neither they nor anybody else committed.

Didn't we spend decades in America, and centuries in Western
civilization, trying to get away from the idea that who you are
determines what your legal rights are?

What kind of judges are we talking about?

A classic example is federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who could have
bankrupted a small New Jersey town because they decided to stop
putting up with belligerent homeless men who kept disrupting their
local public library. Judge Sarokin's rulings threatened the town with
heavy damage awards, and the town settled the case by paying $150,000
to the leading disrupter of its public library.

After Bill Clinton became president, he elevated Judge Sarokin from
the district court to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Would President
Barack Obama elevate him — or others like him — to the Supreme Court?
Judge Sarokin certainly fits Obama's job description for a Supreme
Court justice.

A court case should not depend on who you are and who the judge is. We
are supposed to be a country with "the rule of law and not of men."
Like all human beings, Americans haven't always lived up to our
ideals. But Obama is proposing the explicit repudiation of that ideal
itself.

That is certainly "change," but is it one that most Americans believe
in? Or is it something that we may end up with anyway, just because
too many voters cannot be bothered to look beyond rhetoric and style?

We can vote a president out of office at the next election if we don't
like him. But we can never vote out the federal judges he appoints in
courts across the country, including justices of the Supreme Court.

The kind of judges that Barack Obama wants to appoint can still be
siding with criminals or terrorists during the lifetime of your
children and grandchildren.

The Constitution of the United States will not mean much if judges
carry out Obama's vision of the Constitution as "a living document"—
that is, something that judges should feel free to change by
"interpretation" to favor particular individuals, groups or causes.

We have already seen where that leads with the 2005 Kelo Supreme Court
decision that allows local politicians to take people's homes or
businesses and transfer that property to others. Almost invariably,
these are the homes of working class people and small neighborhood
businesses that are confiscated under the government's power of
eminent domain. And almost invariably they are transferred to
developers who will build shopping malls, hotels or other businesses
that will bring in more tax revenue.

The Constitution protected private property, precisely in order to
prevent such abuses of political power, leaving a small exception when
property is taken for "public use," such as the government's building
a reservoir or a highway.

But just by expanding "public use" to mean "public purpose" — which
can be anything — the Supreme Court opened the floodgates.

That's not "a living Constitution." That's a dying Constitution — and
an Obama presidency can kill it off.
(c) 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZThjMGE1Mjg1MzI2YzY2YTJjNmFiZjU3YjY4M2JkMDk=
Here comes the Judge
Judge This
Obama and the law.

By Thomas Sowell
One of the biggest and most long-lasting "change" to expect if Barack
Obama becomes president of the United States is in the kinds of
federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as
well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom
will have lifetime tenure.