Will mercy be tempered by justice? 16

 The dear leader said (July 17, 2009): 

“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 criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

Does this mean that if you are poor, gay, black, disabled, old, you may commit crimes with impunity, or at least be less harshly punished for doing so? It does suggest that poverty, homosexuality, being of a minority race, physical impairment and old age are irresistible forces compelling criminal behavior. Isn’t that insulting to everyone who is poor, gay, black, disabled and old but does not commit crime?

Obama seems to ‘think’ (does he ever really?) that it is identity, who or what people are, that should determine how they are dealt with in the courts rather than the merit of their particular case.

True, the law does at present make special concessions for the juvenile and the lunatic. Now will the courts decree that people who are poor, gay, black or old may not, like children and madmen, be held responsible for their actions?  

If this is how judges are going to judge, it means quite simply the end of the rule of law. The walls, floor, and ceiling of our safety will be gone. 

Why should being any of the things on his list make you more liable to do wrong – and why should it make you a victim of other people’s pity (whether the real kind or the kind pretended to by left-liberal-progressives)?    

Most revealing of all is Obama’s view that if you are African-American you need special indulgence because just being black you are at some unavoidable disadvantage – a particularly strange thing for a president who is himself African-American to believe.  

All we can hope for is that in the Obama courts, mercy may be tempered by justice. 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Saturday, May 2, 2009

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Some of the lasting harm Obama would do 10

 Thomas Sowell writes on the damage that the sort of judges Obama would appoint can do; damage that would last for generations. Here’s a taste of the article, but the whole thing is worth reading for the specific examples of ‘liberal’ injustice he gives.

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.

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, October 28, 2008

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Far-reaching power 117

 The most far-reaching power that a president has is the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court.  The effect of his choices will continue for a long time after his own tenure of office has passed. It’s vital that judges should be appointed who will uphold the Constitution . 

That is one of the best reasons to vote for McCain.

Read the great Thomas Sowell on this subject here.  

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, July 2, 2008

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Obama has another waffle 133

Read here how Obama wants it both ways on the right to bear arms issue.

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Saturday, June 28, 2008

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Will the nation survive Obama-appointed judges? 152

 Read this ominous prediction of the damage Obama could do with appointments to the Supreme Court.

William J. Brennan, Jr., like many of his colleagues then and now (today, think Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer), and countless other federal and state judges throughout the United States, are not just liberals, which would be bad enough. They are, philosophically, collectivists and statists who believe with the orthodoxy of zealots that “rights” are created by society and its Platonic guardians, the judges, and that through the exercise of government power utopian goals can be achieved without regard to constitutional principles or the moral code that underlay them at the Founding.

 

In short, Brennan and his ilk are utterly indifferent to the proper role of judges, and see themselves as uber-legislators imposing their personal policy preferences on the unwashed in the guise of constitutional interpretation.

 

Which bring us to the current election and presumptive Democrat Party nominee, Barack Obama.

 

There are some serious concerns if the fate of the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama’s hands (especially with a compliant Senate). Let’s take a look at the words of Obama himself:

 

On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country’s leading abortion-meisters, “Planned Parenthood.” In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean, Obama not only “leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices,” but “he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy’.”

 

“Empathy,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, is “the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.”

 

Thus, we have been unmistakably warned that Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who will not honestly interpret the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Fourteenth Amendment—let alone on the basis of what they say and meant to those who wrote them—but who, instead, will project their own personalities into others to understand them better; justices who can share in those others’ emotions or feelings.

 

And who might Obama’s empathy-receivers be?

 

Obama himself told us in that same 2007 Planned Parenthood speech: “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.” (My emphasis.)

 

So much for the classical liberal philosophy that was at the founding’s core and in its fundamental documents. From now on, constitutional interpretation Obama-style is to be through the eyes of whom he sees as society’s alleged victims.

 

Obama’s confession drops Brennan’s Living Constitutionalism into yet a lower rung of hell. His confession reveals that while the Brennanites fed the Living Constitution’s voracious appetite in order to achieve the amorphous goals of “social justice, brotherhood, and human dignity,” Obama will nurture the beast with what’s left of limited government and individual rights, all in the name of “empathy”—a code word for something much darker: sacrifice of constitutionalism to the needs of society’s perceived victims.

 

This perversion of America’s essence—individuals as supreme, with government as their servant—is Brennanism squared. While our Nation has been able to survive Brennanism—though with the recent Guantanamo decisions, especially Boumediene v. Bush, who knows?— will it be able to survive Obama-appointed Supreme Court justices?

 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Friday, June 20, 2008

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Obama’s ignorance or mendacity 161

 This from Power Line:

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania last Saturday, Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process – that’s the essence of who we are." He explained:

I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.

John and I derived some precepts for trial lawyers from the Nuremberg trial in "Lessons from the cross-examination of Hermann Goehring." In the course of researching that article I was reminded that the Nuremberg trial was conducted before a military commission composed of representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The most prominent surviving Nazi leaders were brought for trial before the Nuremberg tribunal in late 1945. Winston Churchill had proposed, not unreasonably, that they be summarily shot. The victorious allies nevertheless subsequently agreed that they would be brought before a military commission to be convened pursuant to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945.

 

In Boumediene, the Supreme Court disapproved of the system of military commissions Congress had adopted at the Supreme Court’s urging. Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the Nuremberg defendants’ "day in court" occurred before the kind of tribunal the Supreme Court found constitutionally inadequate in Boumediene.

The Nazi war criminals were given no access to American courts. Their rights were governed by the charter annexed to the London Agreement. Here is the fair trial provision of the charter:

In order to ensure fair trial for the Defendants, the following procedure shall be followed:

 

(a) The Indictment shall include full particulars specifying in detail the charges against the Defendants. A copy of the Indictment and of all the documents lodged with the Indictment, translated into a language which he understands, shall be furnished to the Defendant at reasonable time before the Trial.

(b) During any preliminary examination or trial of a Defendant he will have the right to give any explanation relevant to the charges made against him.

(c) A preliminary examination of a Defendant and his Trial shall be conducted in, or translated into, a language which the Defendant understands.

(d) A Defendant shall have the right to conduct his own defense before the Tribunal or to have the assistance of Counsel.

(e) A Defendant shall have the right through himself or through his Counsel to present evidence at the Trial in support of his defense, and to cross-examine any witness called by the Prosecution.

The charter provision on the appeal rights of the Nuremberg defendants was even shorter and sweeter. There were no appeal rights. Article 26 provided: "The judgment of the Tribunal as to the guilt or the innocence of any Defendant shall give the reasons on which it is based, and shall be final and not subject to review."

 

In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama’s unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggest either that he does not know what he’s talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth.

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Thursday, June 19, 2008

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The Gitmo Nightmare 203

 That is the title of this article, which is not about the conditions at Guantanamo since they are amazingly soft and lenient, but about the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional overriding of the political branches of government. 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Monday, June 16, 2008

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The supremacy of the law 68

 The five Supreme Court judges who decided that captured terrorists being held prisoner by US forces should be granted the right of habeas corpus, thus arrogantly appointing themselves legislators in defiance of the Constitution, need to be reminded of this:

‘Be you ever so high, the Law is above you.’  

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Sunday, June 15, 2008

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A constitutional and security debacle 254

 Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States, by a majority of 5-4, conferred the right of habeas corpus on alien enemies for the first time in history.

So the usurpation of powers by unelected judges proceeds to the peril of the people.

Justice Scalia: ‘The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.’

The writer of this article agrees.   

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Friday, June 13, 2008

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