Charles Krauthammer has advice for Republicans when it comes to approaching the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
Transcript
BRET BAIER: Charles, you listen to everyone. You read the papers and you see that Republicans just can't stand up and oppose Sonia Sotomayor, otherwise they risk the entire Hispanic vote.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: They can and they should. They should do nothing about rumors in liberal magazines about her intellectual capacity, nothing about her temperament, nothing ad hominem. It should be entirely on judicial philosophy. This ought to be a seminar. It ought to focus on two issues.
Number one: Identity politics, as we saw in that clip. She and the president believe that her background is extremely important in her ruling as a judge. She says that she has the physiological, cultural, and experiential tools as a Latina woman to be a superior judge to a white male, which is reflective perfectly of the Democratic Party's identity politics, in which free citizens are herded into groups, arranged in a hierarchy of wisdom, authority, and entitlement.
That's a Democratic idea, and I think it's her idea. And it ought to be emphasized.
Secondly is the idea that Obama has stressed, and she has, as justice as empathy -- understanding a person's position, their needs, their wants, their history, and how a ruling will affect their lives.
That is entirely contrary to the Western tradition of justice, which is blind as to the person's station in life. Republicans ought ask her, 'How do you believe in that and swear her oath?' If she is on the Court, she is going to have to swear an oath which says, 'I do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to poor and to rich.'
That's what Republicans ought to do and not attack her in a personal way, in any way.
Video.
2 comments:
I usually agree with Krauthammer, but this time I must part with him. Sure, there are symbols out there suggesting blindness to the parties' station in life (i.e. lady justice with the blindfold over her eyes), but this is a symbol of an ideal of impartiality, an ideal that the equities of a case should be balanced without regard to certain irrelevant and extraneous factors, such as unjustified and selfish biases. This is not to suggest a numbness to what is at stake in a controversy before a court.
As the Supreme Court's precedent in the 14th Amendment arena suggests, one's "station in life" is one of those factors that a Court should consider; indeed, the equal protection clause and it's corresponding case law CALL UPON the Court to make those determinations. How onerous a burden a state has to meet in order for a discriminatory action to stand is determined in large part by the nature of the class being discriminated against. Racial discrimination imposes the highest burden, then gender discrimination, then lastly other classes such as the mentally challenged, drug addicts, homosexuals, and the poor. To be sure, a large part of the analysis in the equal protection arena is defining the class being discriminated against, along with an informal list of factors that the Court will consider in finding what burden the state should meet with regard to such a class. How can these determinations be made without considering the class's situation and circumstances?
As such, it seems then that the question of the oath creates a catch 22: either take the oath Krauthammer suggests and trample stare decisis and the very call of the Bill of Rights to treat people like individuals and not inhuman categories (butting up against another Constitutional canon of construction never to render any provision of the Constitution as meaningless) or forsake his definition of the oath and be truthful with and follow the path charted by the Supreme Court in the last 200 years.
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