BrianGarst.com

President Barack Obama has announced his replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.  It is going to be Sonia Sotomayor, a judge who embodies not only the American dream, but the President’s stated criteria for what makes a good Supreme Court judge.  Unfortunately, those criteria are misguided and have delivered a judge with a philosophy antithetical to the proper role of the judiciary in a constitutional republic.

The politics of the pick are overwhelmingly positive for the President.  Sonia Sotomayor is a great American story.  She rose from poverty to attend the top law schools in the nation and, today, has been appointed to the highest staiton in her chosen field.  That’s great.  It’s a testament to the pre-Obama America, and that it was never the horrible place that he, and his wife, have made it out to be.

But that’s not the real genuis of the pick.  To put it simply, it’s all about identity politics.  The left is already wrapping her up in her gender/ethnicity to protect her from criticisms on her substantive record.   I say once again, welcome to Obama’s post-racial America, where everything is about race.  Those remaining racists in America, who insist on seeing every event through the distorted goggles of race, celebrate the pick without the slightest consideration to what actually matters on the court: judicial philosophy.  They celebrate it because they think more people are now “represented” on the court.  But the court does not have representatives, it has judges.  Its members are not there to advance interests of constituency groups; they are there to follow the law.  The text of the law does not change based on the ethnic background of the person reading it.

Sonia Sotomayor does not understand this.  She has gone on record not only stating a dangerous judicial philosophy, but one littered with bigoted comments based on leftist identity politics.  In a constitutional republic, the law is made through the people’s representatives in the legislature.  The Executive then carries out that law, and the courts settled disputes based upon it.  There is no room in this system for the courts to make law.  Doing so removes the people from the equation, and thus undermines claims that we are, in fact, a republic.  Yet Sotomayor has made it clear that her view is that the court is a place where policy is made.  Moreover, she thinks she’ll be better at making policy from the bench than a white male, due to her gender and ethnic background.  This rank ignorance of the function of the judiciary is why Sonia Sotomayor must be opposed, but our race obsessed society, molded as it is by years of identity politics, make it impossible to talk about her merits instead of her utter irrelevant characteristics, such as her gender and ethnic background.

Barack Obama constitution Sonia Sotomayor