Expect an Obama presidency to result in poor supreme court justice selection

Dana Pico of "Common Sense Political Thought" concisely pegs where Obama is wrong respecting his criteria for judges.

Mr Obama said, concerning who he would appoint:

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 criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.

This is exactly wrong, just like the editors of Commonweal were wrong. Judges exist to apply the law, as written, not to dispense whatever their notions of “justice” happen to be. This is how we are moving from a representative republic, in which the elected representatives of the people, sitting in constitutionally-constituted legislatures, write and vote for the laws under which our society is governed, to an oligarchy of nine unelected judges. If a law strikes people as unjust, the proper mechanism for redress exists: petition to the government for change — a right specifically protected by the First Amendment. For example, our good friends at the Delaware Liberal have been on the story of the state legislature trying to modify the eminent domain law to prohibit injustices such as were allowed by Kelo v City of New London.¹

Such clear expression calls for little comment. Amen, Dana.