An Obama Supreme Court -->LONG Term Disability

Speaking in July 2007 at a Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, D.C., Senator Barack Obama said: "We 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."

Shouldn't the criteria be understand the constitution? Along with a tax and spend philosophy, a protectionist trade policy, and an appeasement based foreign policy, Senator Barack Obama may get to replace two or even three Supreme Court Justices should he be elected to POTUS. Enough to change the court into a third legislative body. And since Supreme Court Judges are appointed for LIFE, an Obama presidency would inflict a long term disability on the US Constitution.

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Constitutional Crisis

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

IBD Series: Obama vs. McCain — The Great Divide

Presidents come and go. Even our worst ex-president, Jimmy Carter, lasted only one term, so the damage he could do, while grievous, was finite. People could act on their buyer's remorse at the next election.

Supreme Court justices are a different story. They are appointed for life, and the damage they can do to our nation is infinite and usually irreversible. Who appoints them matters.

The Constitution, it has been said, is a document written by geniuses to design a government that can be run by idiots. It defines and limits that government's powers and obligations, and lists rights designed to protect individuals from government excesses. It has been under assault from those who would change the Constitution from a document carved in stone into an Etch-a-Sketch.

Obama is one of those believers in a "living Constitution." Speaking in July 2007 at a Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, D.C., he said: "We 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."

By those criteria, we should not be surprised to see Oprah Winfrey on his short list of future justices. McCain has a different view of both the Constitution and the Supreme Court, one based on the law and not emotion or good intentions.

"My nominees will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power, and clear limits to the scope of federal power," McCain has said, citing Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito as the type of justices he would appoint. Barack Obama was one of only 22 senators to oppose Roberts. McCain, by contrast, supported Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork.

Obama not only voted against Roberts and Alito, he also voted against the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen to federal appeals court posts. The appeals court is the farm system for Supreme Court justices. Clarence Thomas sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second-most-prominent court.

"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was an exp — a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation," Obama said, catching himself before the 'e' word — experience — fell from his teleprompter-trained lips. Even Obama knows that Thomas is eminently more qualified to sit on the Supreme Court than Obama is to sit in the Oval Office.

Legal scholar Obama also said of Thomas, "I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the Constitution." One of those interpretations relates to gun control. In the 5-4 Heller decision, Thomas was in the majority in deciding the 2nd Amendment's "right to bear arms" was an individual right and the District of Columbia's gun ban was unconstitutional. Obama thought otherwise.

The type of justices Obama would appoint, like Ginsburg, recently decided in a 5-4 decision that capital punishment for child rapists was unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the decision was based on "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

By another 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court decided that Guantanamo detainees had a right to take their cases for release to federal courts. Obama has campaigned on a promise that "I will restore habeas corpus for detainees." McCain called the ruling "one of the worst decisions in history," one that "opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our Constitution."

Justice Antonin Scalia, another judge whom Obama would not have appointed, recently slammed the view of a "living Constitution" endorsed by Obama. Some judges, he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center, were more concerned with promoting their "personal policy preferences" than interpreting the law.

"When we are in that mode," he said, "you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless." That's exactly what Barack Obama has in mind.