The Sotomayor Nomination

President Obama has had the opportunity to nominate his first Supreme Court justice with the recent announcement that Justice David Souter is retiring. That his choice, Sonya Sotomayor, is liberal, should not be a surprise to anyone. Consequently, her view that courts make policy ought to have been expected as well.

Activist courts are about the least democratic aspect, when they occur, of any democracy. If you want to change law then work to change the law. If we are a 'nation of laws, not men', as our Founders asserted, then a judge or justice has nothing less than a moral obligation to rule according to what the law says and not along the lines of what they might like it to be.

Judge Sotomayor is sure to be scrutinized on this point, and well she should. It is not likely to affect her becoming part of the country's highest tribunal, nor will her eventual place on the bench constitute (a bit of irony using that word, I must say) a radical philosophical shift of the Roberts Court. But what I find rather interesting are the vague grumbles coming from a faction on the left. In yesterday's Detroit Free Press, a liberal rag, Stephen Henderson, the paper's editorial page editor, bemoaned the fact that while offering his partisans a reliable liberal vote President Obama missed the chance to find a liberal who might have appeal across political lines. Someone whose jurisprudential reasoning might be respected on all fronts; a consensus builder is who Mr. Henderson would prefer.

I doubt that such a tried and true liberal exists any more than I think a complimentary conservative voice is out there. There is little room to compromise between the diametrically opposed: all that can be expected is tolerance, that poor tasting acceptance that some things are just beyond our control and nothing more. But to hear a liberal knock a liberal for being liberal...well, it was interesting.

Maybe, just maybe, her nomination will offer a bit more of a fight than I expect.