OBAMA AND THE LAW
Two chilling articles about the type of courts and laws that Barack Obama wants for us. As Thomas Sowell writes "Do we really want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the law?"
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/10/28/obama_and_the_law
OBAMA AND THE LAW
by Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
One of the biggest and most long-lasting "change" to expect if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States is in the kinds of federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom will have lifetime tenure.
Senator Obama
has stated very clearly what kinds of Supreme Court justices he wants--
those with "the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or
African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."
Like so many
things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don't stop and think--
and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really want judges who
decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the
law?
If the case
involves a white man versus a black woman, should the judge decide that
case differently than if both litigants are of the same race or sex?
The kind of
criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten three young men
at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that neither they nor
anybody else committed.
Didn't we spend
decades in America, and centuries in Western civilization, trying to
get away from the idea that who you are determines what your legal
rights are?
What kind of judges are we talking about?
A classic example
is federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who could have bankrupted a small New
Jersey town because they decided to stop putting up with belligerent
homeless men who kept disrupting their local public library. Judge
Sarokin's rulings threatened the town with heavy damage awards, and the
town settled the case by paying $150,000 to the leading disrupter of
its public library.
After Bill Clinton became president, he elevated Judge Sarokin from the district court to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Would President Barack Obama elevate him-- or others like him-- to the Supreme Court? Judge Sarokin certainly fits Obama's job description for a Supreme Court justice.
A court case
should not depend on who you are and who the judge is. We are supposed
to be a country with "the rule of law and not of men." Like all human
beings, Americans haven't always lived up to our ideals. But Obama is
proposing the explicit repudiation of that ideal itself.
That is certainly
"change," but is it one that most Americans believe in? Or is it
something that we may end up with anyway, just because too many voters
cannot be bothered to look beyond rhetoric and style?
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.
We have already seen where that leads with the 2005 Kelo Supreme Court decision
that allows local politicians to take people's homes or businesses and
transfer that property to others. Almost invariably, these are the
homes of working class people and small neighborhood businesses that
are confiscated under the government's power of eminent domain. And
almost invariably they are transferred to developers who will build
shopping malls, hotels or other businesses that will bring in more tax
revenue.
The Constitution
protected private property, precisely in order to prevent such abuses
of political power, leaving a small exception when property is taken
for "public use," such as the government's building a reservoir or a
highway.
But just by expanding "public use" to mean "public purpose"-- which can be anything-- the Supreme Court opened the floodgates.
That's not "a living Constitution." That's a dying Constitution-- and an Obama presidency can kill it off.
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We've seen it over and over, people in Europe who imagine that they should be 
Friday, October 24, 2008
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