Posted by
Roxanna M. on Thursday, February 28, 2008 1:52:22 PM
If Barack Obama is elected President, he could nominate at least one person to the United States Supreme Court. Since there are several on the bench who have already overstayed their welcome, he could nominate more.
Apparently, this is what he has had to say on the subject:
" . . . when you look at what makes a great Supreme Court justice, it's not just the particular issue and how they rule, but it's their conception of the Court. And part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don't have a lot of clout . . ."
Further, "If we can find people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them, that's the kind of person I want on the Supreme Court."
And further, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the critera by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
He couldn't be more wrong if he tried. The purpose of a judge, any judge anywhere on any court, is NOT to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, but to apply the applicable law to the facts of the case and NOT be swayed by these outside factors that BO thinks are so important.
If the poor, the vulnerable, the outsider, the minority is in the wrong and the rich, the powerful, the insider, the majority is in the right, then judgment must be for the latter. Judges who don't like the law can (1) work to change it, and/or (2) step down. Judges who don't follow the law and won't step down should be removed.
If the law doesn't mean what it says, then it is no longer the law. It becomes nothing more than meaningless words on a page that can be applied in any fashion, subject only to the whim of whoever reads them. That's not law, that's chaos.