If anyone had any doubt that the courts matter, check out this article in today’s Hill about Republicans and allied groups vowing to spend millions on legal challenges to healthcare reform and other parts of the Obama agenda.

Health care, global warming, financial reform, workers rights--you name it.  The courts make a huge difference in the lives of all Americans. Who sits on those courts--and how fully they embrace our core constitutional values--is critical.

That’s why there’s so much urgency about breaking the current nominations impasse created by Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction. And that’s why we need a bold choice to fill any new vacancy on the Court--someone who understands the constitution mandates attention to the interests of all, not just a privileged few.

Taking a cue from Karl Rove’s playbook, the Right is trying to transform one of the key strengths of a top-quality jurist – empathy – into a serious flaw. For example, earlier today, Michael Steele told an audience that "the President is looking to put Doctor Phil on the Court."

Last Friday’s Washington Post reported on the Right’s strategy:

An early line of attack emerged last week when Obama told reporters that his eventual nominee would have, among other characteristics, a "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."

Wendy Long, chief counsel of the Judicial Confirmation Network, a small Manassas-based group that has been active in conservative judicial battles, immediately pounced on the remark. "What he means is he wants empathy for one side, and what's wrong with that is it is being partial instead of being impartial," said Long, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. "A judge is supposed to have empathy for no one but simply to follow the law."

A judge who is willfully blind to impact of the law on real people would be a throwback to the type of jurisprudence that once kept women from becoming lawyers, that kept blacks and whites in separate schools, that kept Japanese Americans in detention camps, and that kept gay men in constant fear of arrest and imprisonment.

Just take a look at Plessey v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that upheld racial segregation. The Court deliberately ignored the real-world effect of segregation:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument [that state-mandated segregation violates the Constitution] to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

African Americans living under Jim Crow would have to wait more than a half century before Justices with empathy would reconsider the issue.

Empathy is not a strike against a judge: No jurist committed to our core constitutional values can be without it. And that’s the type of jurist we need on the Court.

Ed Whelan in yesterday's post about Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals nominee David Hamilton bemoans Hamilton's "inventive invocation of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant's possession of cocaine." Sound ominous? Perhaps - if it were true.

Here's the real story.

There were two defendants in this case. The first, the cocaine dealer, was convicted and received a sentence from Judge Hamilton of 188 months. Although Hamilton concluded that the search warrant pursuant to which drugs were found was not based on probable cause, he nonetheless refused to exclude the evidence obtained from the search because the officers conducted the search based on good faith that the warrant was properly issued. The defendant challenged Judge Hamilton's decision on appeal and lost in the Seventh Circuit. No substantive due process suppression of evidence for this defendant.

The second defendant was a girlfriend of the convicted cocaine dealer. She was charged with possession of marijuana and related offenses--but what concerned Judge Hamilton was how the police collected their evidence against her: by using a school social worker to interrogate her nine-year old daughter for, as Judge Hamilton found, the sole purpose of getting the "goods" on her mother.

This offended Judge Hamilton's sense of fundamental fairness and he concluded as such in an extremely carefully-reasoned opinion. He found that this governmental abuse of power violated a core interest at the "foundation of American liberty long protected by constitutional safeguards: the privacy and sanctity of family relations."

The Seventh Circuit didn’t agree with Judge Hamilton’s analysis of the government’s rationale for questioning the defendant’s daughter and the balancing of government interests v. intrusion into familial relations and it so reversed the decision. But this is not exactly the picture of "extremism" painted by Whelan, is it?
 

News reports state that David Hamilton, a federal district court judge in Indiana, will be President Obama’s first judicial nominee. He will apparently be nominated to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

I am just learning about Judge Hamilton. In 2005, according to the New York Times, "he made news by ruling that the legislature was prohibited from beginning its sessions with overtly Christian prayers. The decision drew widespread criticism in the legislature and across the state."

I can only imagine.

The overwhelming majority of Indianans are Christian. I’d venture to guess that very few of them have ever lived in a society where theirs was a minority religion, and where the government officially promoted a religion that condemned theirs. The experience of their lives is one where they are comfortably in the majority.

As a Jew who grew up in conservative Texas, my experience is different. I know how it felt in elementary school when public school teachers imposed their Christianity upon the classroom. Officially-sanctioned Christianity regularly made it clear that I was an outsider in my own society: I did not belong.

That is but one of the many excellent reasons that the Founders wisely adopted the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion by government. But it’s the one that first occurred to me as I read about the Indiana legislative prayer case.

It is important that judges as a group reflect the diversity of America, so the bench is filled with jurists with a wide variety of life experiences, ranging from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. But that does not excuse the individual judge from being able to step outside their own life experience and recognize that what is not a problem for them can be a severe problem for someone whose life has been different. That is an essential quality for a judge. It’s what made the Brown v. Board of Education decision so different from Plessey v. Ferguson, even though both cases were decided by all-white Courts. Similarly, it’s what made 1976’s Craig v. Boren (establishing a higher level of scrutiny for legal sex-based classifications) so different from 1872’s Bradwell v. Illinois (upholding the state’s prohibition against women attorneys), even though both cases were decided by an all-male Court.

Perhaps Judge Hamilton’s ability to step outside his own experiences helped him decide the legislative prayer case. Either way, he clearly was willing to enforce the First Amendment and clear Supreme Court precedent in a case where he knew that he would be condemned by many people in his state. He put the law over ideology. That’s another quality needed in a judge.

This is an encouraging first judicial nomination from President Obama.

Great editorial in New York Times this morning recognizing the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans threatening to filibuster President Obama's judicial nominees well before any are named and urging Senator Leahy to let the blue slip process -- under which senators get a way to block judicial nominees from their home state -- die quietly. The editorial very eloquently echoes some of the most important points People For the American Way has been making for weeks, and it is definitely worth reading.

When President George W. Bush was stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues, Senate Republicans threatened to change the august body's rules if any Democrat dared to try to block his choices, even the least-competent, most-radical ones. Filibustering the president's nominees, they said, would be an outrageous abuse of senatorial privilege.

Now that President Obama is preparing to fill vacancies on federal benches, Republican senators have fired off an intemperate letter threatening -- you got it -- filibusters if Mr. Obama's nominees are not to their liking. Mr. Obama should not let the Republicans' saber-rattling interfere with how he chooses judges.

Read the whole article.