When candidate Sonia Sotomayor was in line to be a Supreme Court justice, besides her wealth of experience, the arguments in favor of her were best stated when she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
In light of Sotomayor’s statement, I see no difference between Supreme Court candidate Elena Kagan and Ruth Ginsburg. Except the fact that Kagan has no experience as a judge, only practiced law from age 29 to 31 and never as the lead attorney. They were both born in New York, to white Jewish families and attended Harvard Law School. Are you going to tell me we cannot find an Asian or African-American woman with a law degree from the West Coast?
Soon our Supreme Court will have six Catholics, three Jews and zero Protestants. Since Americans are 51 percent Protestant, 23 percent Catholic, 3.3 percent other Christian, 1.7 percent Jewish and 21 percent other. That means from a religious standpoint 75 percent of Americans will not be represented in our highest court.
To make matters worse, eight out of nine Supreme Court justices attended Harvard and Yale. President Obama seems to be missing the point when it comes to diversity. Diversity is not just gender and skin color. If you take people from different races and brainwash them at the same two schools, you get the same “group think” results. That’s how the Taliban and the Nazis work. We need a judge of Asian descent from a west coast school to represent the richness of the American experience and not another academic from Harvard.
In all fairness, many of you know the real reason why President Obama selected Elena Kagan. It’s the pink elephant in the room. The secret she keeps deep in her heart. So let me let the cat out of closet. She is a judicial activist. We have two views in the U.S. about the Constitution. Judicial activists believe the Constitution is a living document and can be re-interpreted to create law on a whim of a judge. The opposing view sees the Constitution as a static shield that protects “the rights of the people” from powerful leaders that wish to take those rights away, supposedly for our own good.
President Obama in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” talks about his view of the Constitution. He states: “It is not a static but rather a living document.” Obama goes on to say when asked about “truly difficult” cases, he states: “The last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”
It is scary to think that Obama wants judges that use the “richness of her experiences” and not the law to make rulings. This is the real reason why Elena Kagan was nominated. If we keep electing judges who create legislation from the bench, we’ll find this to be a slippery slope when that judge rules away those self evident, constitutional rights that are important to all of us. The only job of a supreme court justice is to determine if a law is constitutional. That’s it.
Whoopi Goldberg wants us to believe it was the interpretation of a judge that freed the slaves, but forgets that it was Congress and 75 percent of the states and their legislatures that created the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery. It takes longer to get a large number of people to pass a law, but that prevents tyranny.
Whoopi Goldberg would have you believe the Supreme Court freed the slaves. In fact it was an activist justice with no prior experience as a judge by the name of Roger Taney that extended slavery. As chief justice of the Supreme Court, he prevented the freeing of the slaves with the Dred Scott Decision. It is the responsibility of our representatives to write laws. Judicial activism subverts our laws by allowing the judges to create laws. The court should only tell us if it is constitutional or not. As a liberal or conservative, judicial activism should scare you.
As chief justice of the Supreme Court, judicial activist Roger Taney ruled based on the richness of his experience as a slave owner.
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Judicial experience matters the most when it comes to being the highest judge in our country and not life experience. Let’s all call the nomination of Elena Kagan what it is — political cronyism.
David Alsabery is a high performance driving instructor and all around nice guy. He can be reached at alsabery@gmail.com.
