- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
November 3, 2008
Exclusive: Obama and the Law: On Legal Issues, a Radical Turn to the Left
If the American people elect Barack Obama president, one of the biggest casualties will be the efforts by recent Republican administrations to populate the federal judiciary with jurists who believe in judicial restraint – that is, who oppose using the courts to rewrite the law to advance the Left's political agenda. A President Obama would in all likelihood populate the courts with liberal ideologues who believe that abortion on demand and homosexual "marriage" are constitutional rights; who think that the war on terror could be fought by prosecuting terrorists in U.S. courtrooms.
As president, Obama would likely be able to nominate at least two Supreme Court Justices. Two prominent members of the court's liberal bloc, Justice John Paul Stevens, 88, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75, could well retire in the next few years. Four of the justices will reach their 75th birthday before the end of the next presidential term. What kind of justices would Obama replace retirees with? Certainly not ones like Clarence Thomas. In August, Mr. Obama, asked what kind of Supreme Court justice he would nominate, took a snide dig at Thomas. He said he would not have nominated him, saying he was not "a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation." Obama said he would not have nominated current Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Antonin Scalia, although he conceded they (unlike Thomas) were qualified for the job.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, it was truly bizarre that Obama was belittling Thomas, considering that his résumé prior to his nomination to serve on the Supreme Court in 1991 was far more impressive than Obama's current qualifications for president. When he was nominated, Thomas had, among other things, served as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. He had also run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia – the second most prominent court in the country. Obama, by contrast, has served four years in the U.S. Senate (nearly two years of which he has spent running for president). Before that, he served time as a law-school lecturer and a "community organizer" working with groups like ACORN. Obama and the political Left are deeply threatened by the presence of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. As a black conservative, his elevation to the court constituted a repudiation of the idea that the Left should have a monopoly right to speak as the "authentic" voice of the African-American.
Although Obama grudgingly allowed that Roberts was intellectually qualified to serve, he made clear that he would nominate people to the bench who would do all they could to negate the efforts of justices like Roberts to move the judiciary away from social engineering. "We'd want a nominee who would do what John Roberts did," an Obama staffer told Slate magazine. "You'd go through the process and say, 'Hey, I'll look at each case as it comes.' You have a moderate temperament. You're affable and everybody likes you. And then you get up there, and after a year and a half, you vote on the opposite side from John Roberts in every single case where that's warranted and it matters."
Obama would use the courts to dictate a "progressive" social agenda. The Illinois senator "has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice," according to his spokesman Tommy Victor. Obama has said he wants justices who have "the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom" or to be poor, black or homosexual. Asked what kind of judges he would appoint, Obama has cited three members of the Supreme Court's liberal bloc: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter. In his superb book, The Case Against Barack Obama, David Freddoso of National Review Online outlined some examples of the legal handiwork of Obama's favorite justices:
*In May 2008, Ginsburg and Souter were on the short end of a 7-2 ruling on criminal penalties for child pornography.
*In Kelo v. New London, Breyer joined Souter and Ginsburg in ruling that local governments could take away people's homes to give them to developers under eminent domain.
*In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. Obama's favorite justices rejected the argument that private organizations like the Boy Scouts should have the right to set their own standards of conduct by barring openly homosexual scoutmasters.
Obama's radical views about the role of the judiciary extend to protecting the United States from Jihadist terrorism. In June, he cited the trial of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 as an example of the "success" of the antiterrorism tactics employed during the Clinton years. It would be difficult to imagine a more delusional view. During the 1995 prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the "blind sheikh") prosecutors turned over the names of 200 unindicted co-conspirators over to the defense as they were required to do by the rules of the civilian criminal justice system. Within 10 days, according to U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, who presided over the case, the list was in downtown Khartoum, and Osama bin Laden, then operating out of Sudan, knew the U.S. government was on his trail.
Stewart Baker, who served under President Clinton as general counsel of the National Security Agency, explained just how dangerous this legalistic approach to fighting terrorism could be in reality: In a December 31, 2003, op-ed in Slate magazine, Baker explained how the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence (constructed in 1995 by Jamie Gorelick, the number two person in the Clinton Justice Department made it impossible to locate two of the September 11th hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, during the summer of 2001 – even though the government knew the pair were inside the United States. The FBI, acting on legal advice, refused to involve its criminal agents in the investigation. After FBI headquarters sent a memo telling an FBI intelligence agent that members of the agency's criminal division could not participate in the investigation, the agent replied in disturbingly prescient terms: "[S]omeday someone will die – and wall or not – the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [short for Usama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader] is getting the most 'protection.'" Yet Mr. Obama, who may be elected our next president tomorrow, would have the United States adopt such a model for fighting terror.
Some of the top people advising Obama on legal issues ought to raise red flags in the minds of voters. One is Charles Ogletree, a Harvard criminal law professor. Ogletree blames "the legacy of slavery" (rather than failed government social programs and mandates) for the existence of "well-documented racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, employment and insurance, and in the form of racial profiling, the high rate of single-parent homes and the disproportionate number of black inmates." Instead of dealing with serious issues like black-on-black crime, failing public schools, the failure of urban renewal, public housing and myriad Great Society programs, Ogletree advocates "bringing the government into litigation" over reparations for slavery. Ogletree counseled Anita Hill during the failed 1991 campaign to defeat Clarence Thomas's nomination to the High Court.
Yet another prominent lawyer advising Obama is Eric Holder, former deputy attorney general in President Clinton's Justice Department, is controversial for his involvement in a very different reason: helping to arrange a pardon for fugitive arms trafficker Marc Rich (whose ex-wife was a major Democrat Party donor and lobbied heavily for the pardon) during Clinton's final hours as president.
In short, the election of Barack Obama as president would constitute a victory for radical ideologues who would use their newfound power to populate the federal courts and make it much more difficult to protect the American people from Islamist terror.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
