ANOTHER INJUDICIOUS APPOINTMENT TO THE BENCH
Another Radical Judge
Posted 11/10/2009 07:36 PM ET
Federal Bench: Yet another judicial nominee seeks to impose the “empathy” standard on the courts. He thinks judges should base rulings on a plaintiff’s status, legislate from the bench and amend the Constitution.
Indiana federal judge David Hamilton stands poised to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to assume a seat on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals serving Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. He’s a former fundraiser for Acorn and a former leader of the Indiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He is also another in a series of activist judges who believe the U.S. Constitution is not etched in stone but made of clay, ready to be molded into anything they want. He shares the beliefs of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Edward Chen, nominee for the Northern District of California, that laws can be made from the bench and that empathy, not original intent, should be a judge’s guide.
“Part of our job here as judges is to write a series of footnotes to the Constitution,” Hamilton says. “We all do that every year in cases large and small.”
And that’s precisely the problem. The law should be applied equally and evenly irrespective of who the plaintiffs or defendants might be. Otherwise, equal protection under the law goes out the window.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hamilton said that “empathy” was “important” in fulfilling a judge’s role. “Empathy is the ability to understand the world from another person’s point of view,” he said.
But the only “point of view” a federal judge needs to understand is that of the Founding Fathers.
According to Hamilton, “A judge needs to empathize with all parties in the case — plaintiff and defendant, crime victim and accused defendant — so that the judge can better understand how the parties came to be before the court and how legal rules affect those parties and others in similar situations.”
And here we thought justice should be blind and not wear its heart on its judicial robes.
Hamilton, who was nominated to the district court bench by President Clinton even though he had no judicial experience and was rated as “not qualified” by the ABA, has a history of overturned rulings and admonishments by colleagues and superiors about exceeding his authority.
After Hamilton blocked the enforcement of Indiana’s informed consent abortion law, the Seventh Circuit disagreed, saying: “No court anywhere in the country … has held any similar law invalid in the years since (the Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood vs.) Casey. Indiana is entitled to put the law into effect and have that law judged by its own consequences.”
Judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit scolded Hamilton, noting he was the only judge in the country who had blocked enforcement of a law “materially identical” to laws that the Supreme Court, the Seventh Circuit and the Fifth Circuit had held constitutional. Under Hamilton’s version of the “living Constitution,” even Supreme Court precedent is irrelevant.
As Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has pointed out in a letter to colleagues, Hamilton also has a problem with any expression of religion in the public square — however innocuous — but not with all religion.
Hamilton’s ruling in the 2005 case, Hinrichs v. Bosma, “prohibited prayers in the Indiana House of Representatives that expressly mentioned Jesus Christ … yet he allowed prayers which mentioned Allah,” Sessions also noted. We wonder if Hamilton has a problem with “God save the United States and this Honorable Court,” being uttered as the U.S. Supreme Court enters the courtroom to hear arguments.
Judges such as Hamilton, Chen and Sotomayor believe the courts should be used as instruments of social justice and not to discern the intent of those who wrote the U.S. Constitution. They believe their “life experience” should be the final arbiter of justice.
We don’t believe Hamilton deserves a promotion any more than Chen does or Sotomayor did.
Comments are closed.
