What a lost opportunity to educate the public about the real job of a Supreme Court justice.
In the parable, a blind man, after running his hands over an elephant’s trunk, confidently announces that the elephant is a mighty serpent. Another, after exploring the elephant’s legs, confidently announces that it is a mighty tree. That’s exactly what the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee did to the complex act of judging during the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Republican senators, fixating on a judge’s unquestioned duty to apply existing law, confidently announced that judging is the robotic act of applying known law to known facts. Democrats, fixating on the obvious fact that the law is ambiguous in many cases, confidently announced that judging is the discretionary act of choosing among multiple plausible outcomes.
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