Empathy and Identity Politics; The Dems’ Gravy Train
The Democrats really know how to play the identity politics card and it would appear that Obama does it better than any leader of the liberal party has in a long time!
No longer does it matter to liberals whether or not you are technically qualified for a position based on past job experience, intelligence, background knowledge of the constitution, etc. – nope, what matters now is that you can empathize with races, genders, religions, or any multitude of things that would otherwise be characterized as superficial traits.
Sonia Sotomayor was nominated as Obama’s first choice to replace Chief Justice Souter as a Supreme Court judge. Sonia, however, has not issued an opinion of importance in over 10 years and she has quite a reputation. One tends to lean towards the fact that the only reason she was even nominated was due to her Hispanic background and her gender. This is affirmative action at its finest, and then people wonder why those who are promoted really aren’t qualified and mistakes are made at organizations and companies… Let’s get back to the merit of a candidate rather than the color of their skin/ethnicity (quotas).
What upsets me is not the fact that this woman came from very humble beginnings, really worked her way up to become more successful than most, even with a head start, but the fact that Democrats exploit these facts and use these things about people to gain constituents and voters. This is a ploy used to win the Hispanic vote, which is becoming increasingly important when deciding future elections.
In a presentation that will likely lean heavily on style over substance, Sotomayor’s background will allow the administration to again play class warfare with their presentation of her biography. The daughter of Puerto Rican parents growing up in the South Bronx, her father was a manual laborer and her mother a nurse. Her father died when she was 9.
Sotomayor went on to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School before working as a New York assistant district attorney. Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked a confirmation deal with the first President Bush to nominate Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.
In one of the biggest sources of the coming Sotomayor controversy, is her conduct in the New Haven, Connecticut firefighter case that’s now on appeal to the Supreme Court.
And I’m sure many reading this are curious to find out what the controversy of the case really was – well here is the long and short of it:
In Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with the City of New Haven that was alleged to have used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters. Sotomayor joined a per curiam opinion that went so far as to bury the white firefighters’ crucial claims of unfair treatment. Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her in writing for apparently missing the entire host of Constitutional issues that were before the court.
According to Judge Cabranes, Sotomayor’s opinion “contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case” and its “perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.”
(To judge just how bad the Ricci opinion is, even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, wrote of his dissatisfaction with the case, stating, “Ricci is not just a legal case but a man who has been deprived of the pursuit of happiness on account of race.”
Ironically, Sotomayor’s dreadful decision in Ricci is under review at this time by the Supreme Court with an opinion expected by the end of June when David Souter, the justice Sotomayor is nominated to replace, has announced his retirement.
So the official decision is still technically pending… It would be nice to know what the outcome of that case is before nominating this person as a SCOTUS justice.
This was not the first episode of judicial extremism or liberal activism from this individual…
In another example of her radical judicial philosophy, Sotomayor stated in a 2002 speech at Berkeley that she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color,” which she believes should “affect our decisions.” In the same speech, Sotomayor went on to say, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She restated her commitment to that unlawful judicial philosophy at a speech she gave in 2005 at Duke Law School when she reiterated that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”
The Obama administration has made claims in the media that Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic on the court, which is not entirely accurate. Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Hispanic ancestry, served on the Supreme Court from 1932-1937. Cardozo traced his ancestry to Portugal, yet there is a mixed bag of which government agencies consider Portugal to fall under the Hispanic umbrella. It is accurate to say Sotomayor, should she be confirmed, would be the first Hispanic woman on the court.
Heaven forbid conservatives or anyone else who questions this woman’s qualifications to really uphold the law of the land, will be labeled a bigot. This is the new campaign of the left, which is entirely ironic/humorous if it wasn’t so sad at the same time. So many of color and gender play into this nonsense and believe that the liberals are the party of the common man and that of the minority – when in history, and even to this day, they are anything but. One would think that when race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are used as a means to an end, that would be considered racist, however, the indoctrinated or brain-washed masses do not understand that. The simple fact is the party who advocates individual freedoms and liberties is the party of freedom, the party that associates and segregates by race, gender, religion, etc., is the party of oppression and “plantation” politics. Keep people down so you have voters – it’s the carrot and stick philosophy that you give a little bit to entice the voter, but then you pull it away to keep them coming back for more, never letting them get the entire carrot, because they will no longer be hungry. At that point they will want their own personal liberties and freedoms – if they ever become successful they won’t require affirmative action, welfare, or government in their lives to help them… therefore Democrats will no longer have a voting bloc.
To use an example of this SCOTUS candidate, as to what I just discussed above, we can look at one of her quotes she provided in a public forum.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.
Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.
Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”
But the crux of the matter has more to do with the battles in which the GOP should choose. The opposition of this nomination may unfortunately cause quite a hiccup for republicans in future elections with Hispanics. I do not believe that Sotomayor should be confirmed, that’s my opinion, based on the activism portrayed in several of her decisions and speeches, as well as some off-the-cuff comments made that, by any objective reader, would be considered racist in nature – or at least holding some type of antipathy/grudge towards white males in particular. However, I’m not so sure this is one of those battles that the GOP should choose to commit to.
The liberals know how to instigate a crisis or a distraction on the other side of the aisle, meanwhile passing/creating other, and more substantive legislation and policies. Some of the items that may be more useful than arguing over Sotomayor are the upcoming decision in California regarding gay marriage, where democracy and votes no longer count and a state supreme court could trump the will of the people, cap-and-trade is still on the table, health care reform, immigration reform (which has been tabled until the fall), and Obama’s horrible foreign policy experience, as evidenced in the recent North Korea nuke tests. Obama leans on the United Nations and the rest of the world, because he does not have a backbone of his own to condemn another nation or stand up to it as, for example, Reagan did. The philosophy of the liberals is “look over there, not over here.”
Sotomayor is an intelligent woman, but she is a radical who does not believe in the constitution. She would not be on my shortlist of judicial picks, but this appointment will not be much different than the justice she would be replacing; Souter. The next SCOTUS pick will most likely tend to be more critical than this one…
Obama’s Front Runner for SCOTUS; And Two Other Possibilities
Elections have consequences and this could get very interesting especially when you review the front runner’s qualifications or lack thereof:
The most mentioned candidate to replace David Souter is Elena Kagan, former dean of the Harvard Law School, now President Obama’s Solicitor General. Kagan’s best-known piece of legal scholarship is an article in the 2001 Harvard Law Review arguing in favor of stronger direct presidential control over administrative agencies. It makes for ominous reading at a time when Democrats hold big majorities in the elected branches of government.
Let’s put it this way: If Kagan does reach the court, liberals everywhere are going to have to eat their words about the wickedness of those conservative champions of the “unitary executive” theory: “When we said we were opposed to the unitary executive, that was because we favored a super unitary executive!”
Some extracts from Kagan’s article, 114 Harv. L. Rev. 2245:
[P]residential control of administration, in critical respects, expanded dramatically during the Clinton years, making the regulatory activity of the executive branch agencies more and more an extension of the President’s own policy and political agenda.Faced for most of his time in office with a hostile Congress but eager to show progress on domestic issues, Clinton and his White House staff turned to the bureaucracy to achieve, to the extent it could, the full panoply of his domestic policy goals. Whether the subject was health care, welfare reform, tobacco, or guns, a self-conscious and central object of the White House was to devise, direct, and/or finally announce administrative actions – regulations, guidance, enforcement strategies, and reports – to showcase and advance presidential policies.
**
Accepted constitutional doctrine holds that Congress possesses broad, although not unlimited, power to structure the relationship between the President and the administration, even to the extent of creating independent agencies, whose heads have substantial protection from presidential removal.
The conventional view further posits, although no court has ever decided the matter, that by virtue of this power, Congress can insulate discretionary decisions of even removable (that is, executive branch) officials from presidential dictation – and, indeed, that Congress has done so whenever (as is usual) it has delegated power not to the President, but to a specified agency official. Clinton’s use of what I call directive authority – his commands to executive branch officials to take specified actions within their statutorily delegated discretion – ill-comports with this view. The unitarians would defend the practice simply by insisting, against the weight of precedent, that the Constitution provides the President with plenary authority over administration, so that Congress can no more interfere with the President’s directive authority than with his removal power.
I too defend the practice, but not on this basis. I accept Congress’s broad power to insulate administrative activity from the President, but argue here that Congress has left more power in presidential hands than generally is recognized. More particularly, I argue that a statutory delegation to an executive agency official – although not to an independent agency head – usually should be read as allowing the President to assert directive authority, as Clinton did, over the exercise of the delegated discretion.
**[President] Clinton …developed a set of practices that enhanced his ability to influence or even dictate the content of administrative initiatives. He exercised this power with respect to a wide variety of agency action – rulemakings, more informal means of policymaking, and even certain enforcement activities. … In so doing, Clinton also showed that presidential supervision of administration could operate, contrary to much opinion, to trigger, not just react to, agency action and to drive this action in a regulatory, not deregulatory, direction.
**
Presidents before Reagan… usually had shunned direct [Executive] involvement in any administrative rulemaking, and even Reagan, in creating a mechanism for this involvement, had disclaimed any authority ultimately to displace the judgment of agency officials. The Clinton order, by contrast, implied precisely this power – presidential directive authority over discretionary decisions assigned by Congress to specified executive branch officials (other than the President). Under this view, the President would not need to resort to his power of removal over executive branch heads to ensure a certain rulemaking result: that result would – or at least should – follow by virtue of a presidential (displacing a secretarial) order.
That was merely an excerpt of her opinion paper on the don’t ask don’t tell policies of the Clinton administration, which she agrees with. It gives the executive branch way more control than one ought to have.
But here is some additional information on Ms. Kagan:
“Dean Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be concerning given her complete lack of judicial or appellate experience. She has never been a judge or even argued a case in a court of appeals. It is difficult to see how her experience fundraising for Harvard Law School qualifies her for a seat on the Nation’s high court.
-Dean Kagan has taken positions that are disturbingly out of the mainstream. For example, driven by her view that the “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy adopted by a Democrat Congress and President Clinton is “a profound wrong–a moral injustice of the first order,” she argued that it violates the First Amendment for the United States to withhold funds from colleges that ban the military from recruiting on campus. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this view.
-It is also unclear that a Justice Kagan would be an adequately independent check on executive excesses. She has argued in favor of greatly enhanced presidential control over the bureaucracy, which is concerning in light of President Obama’s unprecedented centralization of power in the White House.
-Dean Kagan has argued that nominees to the Supreme Court should undergo a searching inquiry into the nominee’s substantive views of the law, and should comment particular issues. If nominated, it will be interesting to see whether Dean Kagan remains faithful to this prescription in answering the Committee’s questions.”
So, we could possibly see a Supreme Court justice who has no real litigation or judicial experience? This seems similar to the reasoning behind the liberal argument that Obama was qualified just because of the schools he went to… I call Shenanigans!
And what about two other female candidates? Here are their bios:
Sonia Sotomayor
“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be very concerning given her hard-left record on the Court of Appeals, where she is recognized by practitioners as one of the more liberal judges.
-Judge Sotomayor’s personal views may cloud her jurisprudence. As Judge Sotomayor explained in a 2002 speech at Berkeley, she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color” in their decisionmaking, which she believes should “affect our decisions.”
-Only just recently, in Ricci v. DeStefano, Judge Sotomayor was chastised by fellow Clinton-appointee Jose Cabranes for going to extraordinary lengths to dispense with claims of unfair treatment raised by firefighters. Judge Sotomayor’s panel heard a case raising important questions under Title VII and equal protection law, but attempted to dispose of the firefighter’s arguments in a summary order, until called out by Judge Cabranes. The Supreme Court has agreed to review the case.
-Substantial questions also persist regarding Judge Sotomayor’s temperament and disposition to be a Supreme Court justice. Lawyers who have appeared before her have described her as a “bully” who “does not have a very good temperament,” and who “abuses lawyers” with “inappropriate outbursts.”
Diane Wood
-If nominated to the Supreme Court, Judge Wood will have some substantial questions to answer regarding her judicial philosophy based on her work as a circuit court judge.
Judge Wood’s judicial views have on occasion been far outside mainstream legal thought and appear driven by her personal policy views. In NOW v. Scheidler, she wrote an opinion applying RICO – a statute designed for mob prosecutions – to prevent pro-life activists from engaging in protests. The Supreme Court reversed with Justices Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s concurrence. NOW v. Scheidler, 537 U.S. 393, 402 (2003).
-Judge Wood has betrayed a consistent hostility to religious litigants and religious interests. For example, Christian Legal Soc’y v. Walker, 453 F.3d 853, 867 (7th Cir. 2006), she would have voted to allow a public university to revoke the student organization charter of the Christian Legal Society because it declined to extend membership to homosexuals.
She also authored an opinion refusing to allow prisons to require inmate participation in drug rehabilitation programs that used “explicit religious content,” even where such programs were the only ones available, effectively allowing inmates to refuse treatment entirely. Kerr v. Farrey, 95 F.3d 472 (7th Cir. 1996).”
You can not tell me that these three choices wouldn’t legislate from the bench and aren’t judicial activists.
BTW what was it that Obama said about appointing judges to the Supreme Court and litmus tests? Listen to McCain and Obama’s record…
