Empathy & Women on the Court (I’ll take one but not the other)

Okay, to replace Souter with somebody more liberal, such that it would fundamentally alter the Court’s way of the gun, would likely involve nominating:

• Henri de Saint-Simon
• A member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
• Captain Planet
• Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate

So, we passed. Now, as Reihan Salam (among others) details, the woman’s qualified for the position, and to simply regard her as a mere identity politics pick degrades her pedigree. I mean, hell, she’s been on the Court of Appeals for 11 year. She gave us back baseball in 1994. Basically, she’s not the USS Fail, pictured below:

Of course, we shouldn’t forget the, frankly, astounding comment Judge Sotomayor made with her own little hierarchy of diversity:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

For the past 36 hours my father and I have employed the following reasoning as the obvious conclusion to a number of failings, such as:

“Well, the Braves front office will probably screw up the Francouer trade, probably because Frank Wren doesn’t have the richness of the Latina experience.”

“I don’t know if the Smiths will be able to get their asking price for that lot, probably because they don’t have the richness of the Latina experience.”

We think it’s funny. It’s kind of like — in terms of seriously juvenile comparisons — when Lindsay Lohan called Obama our “first colored president,” and a nation wept, but then was, like, “How old is Lindsay Lohan? 83?.” I patiently await the day we can treat comments like Judge Sotomayor’s with the same kind of stunned, embarrassed, detached amusement.

As I understand it, the concept of the Latino/Latina identity constitutes more than a racial identity, and can be regarded as a cultural outlook; nevertheless, in context, it is a racial, and gendered, judgment. This, of course, is tolerated because of centuries of a reversed imbalance — perhaps it should be. As neither a Latina woman, nor a white male, nor someone who would describe my experiences as rich, I don’t particularly care for the comment.

But, and Mike and I got into an argument on this over GChat, if a woman’s equally qualified as another man, I don’t mind the woman getting picked because she’s a woman (and if the court had a supermajority of women, I wouldn’t mind the reverse). Ann Althouse proposes this hypothetical:

It’s also a separate question whether Presidents should make Supreme Court appointments based purely on legal credentials. Is there some idea that all possible nominees could be ranked and the President ought to choose #1? Assuming some absolute rank order is possible — and I don’t think it is — would you want to limit him that way? Why? What if it meant that the next 100 judges would be white males from upper middle class backgrounds? I think that would be intolerable.

For reasons I can’t explain, I want to see women on the court. I know, just like a woman! Just to be clear, Mike doesn’t care for identity politics (whereas I am an identity politics tease), he’s not a misogynist. Now, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor aren’t quite my champagne wishes, but if we have this small pool of highly qualified, incredibly intellectually superior people for the high court, why not go for the lady?

Now that I’ve had this two ships passing silently in the night moment with feminism or whatever, let’s separate that from this “empathy” tomfoolery, because, apparently, our generation just PINES for somebody to go unchained melody on the Constitution:

This generation wants a nominee who knows that “justice” is an inherently communal concept. And, yes, as President Obama said, we want someone who has “empathy.”

This is also someone who concluded their column with lyrics from “This Land is Your Land,” so take that as you will.

Our opportunity here, as conservatives and the GOP, is to gamble that “empathy” is just as vague as it seems. Let’s blast the full microscope on empathy — do people really want the law decided in part by an emotional, personal feeling of commiseration that perhaps fluctuates and changes depending on the plaintiff? If we can get her to use the word empathy in her hearings, we can test out the bounds of that in the public mind for the next round.

If anything, this was a poor strategic move for Obama; now was the time for the Venom Scalia* to make it rain for the Progressive ideological stripe while Senate morale is high. Then round two to the untouchable, qualified but not barn burning Sotomayor.

*Important aside: Is Scalia Spider-Man or Venom? Venom, right? Villains always get way better storylines and far superior costumes. Plus, if you read the newspaper strip enough and Comics Curmudgeon, you’ll begin to hate Peter Parker so much you won’t want him to ever win anything, let alone be Antonin Scalia in an analogy.

Tagged as: empathy, feelings, sonia sotomayor, stupid ideas