The Judiciary

Like most Democrats, I love reading David Brooks, but a few of his latest columns are venturing into dangerous territory normally reserved for first-year philosophy students who discover relativism and unknowingly repeat that famous line from “The Big Lebowski”: Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Brooks has allowed his curiosity for the latest social science research on cognition and decisionmaking to lead him to make some intellectually sloppy and relativistic arguments. In a column last month, he suggested that all rational thought was an illusion and absolute truth is an anachronistic outpost of dead Greek men. Read more...

Leave it to Barack Obama, a brilliant and nuanced thinker-politician, to add empathy to the list of characteristics he considered in choosing his first Supreme Court appointee. What an interesting and fresh feature to add to the confirmation process.

Empathy is a psychosocial aspect of all our behavior. We are products of our history. While our history is an important part of everything we do and think, it is not the only part. It is an influence. Some justices — Clarence Thomas is an example — rule in unpredictable ways if their personal empathy is the decisive factor in their decisionmaking. The aphoristic debate whether ours is a government of laws or of men (and women, increasingly) suggest, incorrectly, that we cannot be both. Read more...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the American Dream judge by any American standard — someone who started without advantages, worked hard, excelled often and rose to great heights through diligence and talent. Yet here comes the right-wing hate machine, desperate to foment fear, at times appealing to racism, determined to defame a great American and destroy what is left of the sectarian Republican Party.

Let’s be clear. The public face of the Republican Party on this issue, as on most, is: America's most brilliant radio entrepreneur, Rush Limbaugh, devoutly admired by supporters but viewed as an extremist buffoon by millions of swing voters. Newt Gingrich, America's most ambitious politician, seeking to go for the political jugular but unable to resist the gutter-ball. And Tom Tancredo, who has done more than any living Republican to turn Hispanics to the Democrats through the manner in which he conducted the immigration attack. Read more...

John Cornyn, the Texas senator who heads up Republican efforts to recapture control of the Senate, has a reputation as one of the most conservative members of the upper chamber.

He is also one of the most effective.

Cornyn is showing real leadership in his role as campaign chief.

Yesterday, he condemned the remarks made by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich about President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Rush and Newt like to call Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Read more...

The fact that President Obama was able to trap the GOP with his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is an interesting aspect of the selection, but not the most interesting one.

Republicans are flummoxed about how to oppose the historic selection of a Latina to the highest court in the land, and conservatives are adding immense pressure with their criticism of what they view as her liberal record and controversial statements about race and ethnicity playing a role in her decisions. And there is that 2005 tape of her saying that the circuit court is where policy is made. Read more...

Much has been said about the importance of the Hispanic vote.

Some Republican strategists say that for the GOP to be competitive in future presidential elections, they’ll have to capture about 40 percent of this fastest-growing minority group.

President George W. Bush, who spoke a bit of Spanish, had a strategy to reach out to Hispanic voters and actually hit that 40 percent number in the 2004 election. Read more...

Threats from the White House, left-wing groups and the media that any and all criticism of President Obama's choice to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat will be considered racist and sexist have become, in a mere matter of two days, our nation's greatest shame.

Sotomayor will be confirmed. Despite some of her rather shocking statements, her record does not seem to be a reflection of her statements. But the onus is on her to convince the Senate and the American public that her personal bias on race and gender will not affect her decisions on the bench. That's a difficult task for any justice. Read more...

Those of us who enjoy being pretentious are quoting Aristotle, who criticized the law as "mind without reason.”

Step aside, Aristotle. Make way for Barack Obama. In announcing his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, he borrowed from Oliver Wendell Holmes, to many the supreme Supreme Court Justice. Holmes contended, “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. It is vitally important that a justice know how the world works, and how ordinary people live.” Read more...

Barely a day has passed since Sonia Sotomayor's announcement and the media is already scavenging Capitol Hill to see which Republican would take the bait and publicly question President Obama's pick to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. At this rate, I think the Capitol press corps would even saunter over to the House side and see if they can tease Republicans there into disparaging her.

At first glance, the judge has a pretty strong record, along with a history of bipartisan support. She was appointed by Bush 41, and several Republicans still sitting in the Senate voted to confirm her to the post then. Her record of rulings has seemingly played it straight up the middle — and her rhetoric has fallen more in line as a strict constructionist than someone willing to bend the Constitution to meet a leftist agenda. Read more...