Has the remaining remnants of the Republican Party actually gone mad?
"Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, speaking on This Week, warned that if a jurist were to show empathy, "politics, preferences, personal preferences and feelings might take the place of being impartial and deciding cases based upon the law, not upon politics." In an opinion piece in the Washington Times warning that Obama is poised to be the "first president to make lawlessness an explicit standard for Supreme Court Justices," Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network saw empathy as a kind of temporary insanity that so distorts a jurist's vision as to make it difficult "to uphold the federal judicial oath to dispense justice impartially." Over on Fox News, Sean Hannity warned that empathy is the first step toward "social engineering." And in a delicious Freudian slip, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama snorted: "I don't know what empathy means."
sources: http://www.slate.com/id/2218103/
Now after the nomination of Sotomajor they are still attacking "Empathy" as well as using all the anti-woman code words in the Republican Feminazi Thesaurus & Attack Guide.
What is the deal here? Have they been infiltrated by Democrat operatives who are feeding them this destructive garbage. Has Regan's releasing of the asylum inmates finally overwhelmed the party? And they really do expect America to rally to their rhetoric. They really do?
7 comments:
What disturbs me is that John Roberts is not included in the cartoon. And he has quickly become a quiet force for very conservative ends, as profiled in the recent New Yorker.
www.newyorker.com/reporting/
2009/05/25/090525fa_fact_toobin
I don't much like empathy in a judge either. It's so In a Different Voice .
Interesting; the antonyms of empathy include apathy, misunderstanding, unfeelingness,
disregard, indifference, unconcern, mercilessness. An attractive alternative for our
friends on the right. Is Bork still available?
Empathy in a Judge? Without Empathy, there is no Equity. Without Equity, there is no Justice.
Without Justice, Law is meaningless.
Once upon a time the lawyer for the "agency' for which I worked threatened legal action against me for practicing law without a license. Actually he was so mad at me that he was was throwing straw.
My crime was that I was evoking Equity Law as a basis for a Social Justice policy for the State of Oklahoma. He spit and he sputtered and said stupid things because the Big Boss and his Board agreed with the principle and adopted the policy.
Equity Law is a counter point to Common Law. When Common Law can not right a wrong then Equity Law may be used to do so. In Equity Law no wrong shall be without a remedy. Equity is the "Justice" part of Law. Where as the 7th Amendment to the Constitution provides for trial by jury, it does so only under Common Law. Equity Law requires a Justice to make the call for the equitable solution.
In 1938 the U.S. Government combined the Equity and Common Law functions into one legal format. Most legal hacks have forgotten that there ever was an Equity component to the Law. They see only the "Law" and not "Justice".
I said all this to make the point that Equity Law requires a serious degree of Empathy on the part of the Justice resolving the contending rights involved.
If the Constitution is not a document of equal parts Law and Equity then there never has been one. Thus any SCOTUS Justice who can not provide Equity can not do Justice to the Justice required by the Constitution.
Oh, yes, the Lawyer eventually won out over me and later erased most of the Equitable Policies of Social Justice that had been passed.
On more point for you purist out there. Justice is not blind, shen is blindfolded. That's a Swiss invention applied to the Themis statue from the 14th century. Question is how you going to read the scales if you are blindfolded? Not to mention who you going to whack with that sword.
Justice is not blind, Justice is clear sighted.
Actually my favorite depiction of the weighing of the scales of Justice are in the Egyptian Book of The Dead when Anubis is weighing the heart of the dead against the purity of Matt the Goddess of Righteousness. In some BOTDs he has his finger on the scale keeping it balanced. Grace you see was a concept older than we think.
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