The Republikkkons have been using their baseball analogy -- the courts are only umpires who call balls and strikes -- to attack Judge Sotomayor and her "empathy. HOWEVER -- in his opening statement on 13 July, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) fired three fast balls over the plate and the Republikkons struck out!!!
Read on:
This may have been diaried already -- if so, it bears repeating.
The Old Redneck listened to most of the opening statments (all 3.5 hours of them !!) in the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and, IMHO, Senator Whitehouse knocked one out of the park (to continue the wornout baseball analogy).
Here's my favorite passage from his statement:
I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an "umpire" who merely calls "balls and strikes." If judging were that mechanical, we would not need nine Supreme Court Justices. The task of an appellate judge, particularly on a court of final appeal, is often to define the strike zone, within a matrix of Constitutional principle, legislative intent, and statutory construction.
The "umpire" analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts, though he cast himself as an "umpire" during his confirmation hearings. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that "[i]n every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff." Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin's quote, "has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party"? Some coincidence.
For all the talk of "modesty" and "restraint," the right wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases; the first limitation on Roe v. Wade that outright disregards the woman's health and safety; and the DC Heller decision, discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years. Some "balls and strikes." Over and over, news reporting discusses "fundamental changes in the law" wrought by the Roberts Court's right wing flank. The Roberts Court has not kept the promises of modesty or humility made when President Bush nominated Justices Roberts and Alito.
Read his full statement here:
http://whitehouse.senate.gov/...
Hope this doesn't violate the Kos limit on quotes but I thought this was too good not to share.