Follow Your Heart, Not the Law?

One of the most lasting impressions any president makes on our nation is made indirectly. I am talking about the judges he (perhaps someday, she) appoints to the Federal Court system. While policy direction and decision making changes with each administration, and laws enacted can be altered or repealed, judges can, if they wish, serve for life. Because their decisions become the basis for future decisions (this is called "precedent"), the ideology of a judge can impact decisions directly for decades, and, indirectly for literally centuries.

Many, myself included, believe that while the Constitution can demonstrate flexibility by being applied to a nearly infinite number of situations, the principles themselves within the Constitution are essentially unchanging, and ought to be construed to mean what they meant to the founders. Words mean what words mean. This is called "constructionism".

Senator Barack Obama, however, sees things a bit differently, as this article points out.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e 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."

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

If elected, Barack Obama will have the responsibility of nominating up to 6 Supreme Court Justices and many, many more judges to lower courts. This is one more arena in which a vote for Obama is a vote for pragmatism over principle.