Steve Calabresi on Judges, Obama-style

Federalist Society founder Steve Calabresis hits hard on an issue that Sen. John McCain has dropped: the sort of judges that Sen. Barack Obama will nominate if he is elected.

Obama does not think that a judge is a neutral umpire who enforces the rules of the contract, statute or constitution at issue. To the contrary, Obama wants judges who can empathise, but only with the plaintiff:

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e 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."

He thinks that the Warren Court did not go far enough because it failed to create a positive right to "economic justice," that is, a constitutional right to the redistribution of wealth.

Here's the upshot of what we can expect from Obama judges:

a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

If he is elected, Barry can serve for eight years, max. Judges, on the other hand, have life tenure. That's what's at stake next Tuesday.