RSS Feed MenuA white Irishman is about as far away as you can get from a wise Latina woman. Indeed, this white Irishman once remarked “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.” But the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was regarded as one of the wisest men ever to serve in Congress. He received praise from both sides of the aisle for his brilliance, empathy, and political acumen. His experiences weren’t nothin’ to sneeze at either. Born into poverty he attended high school in Harlem and worked as a longshoreman before entering college. He joined the Navy to pay for his education and served on active duty during World War II. After the Navy, he continued a lifetime of government service. In the Johnson administration he helped formulate policy for LBJ’s War on Poverty. No partisan, he would also continue the fight against urban poverty in the Nixon White House. He served as American ambassador to India and as ambassador to the U.N. before entering the Senate. Through this time he managed to maintain a lifetime of scholarship and wrote 19 books. George Will reportedly once quipped of Moynihan: “he wrote more books than most senators have read.”
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He was born into a prominent Kentucky slave-holding family. He strongly supported slavery. And yet John Marshall Harlan would go on to fight in the Union army and become the lone justice on the Supreme Court to dissent in Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow laws. Harlan, who served on the court between 1877 and 1911, wrote famously, “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”
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Today’s pick: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Despite being perhaps the least empathetic person ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court [1902-1932], Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. remains a progressive icon.
Holmes’ less-than-compassionate disposition did not prevent him from penning famous dissents in Lochner v. New York , in which Holmes famously wrote that “a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory” and Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes accused the majority of punishing political dissidents for their opinions rather than their actions. It’s no wonder he earned the nickname “The Great Dissenter.”
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Let’s start with this one: Earl Warren, the 14th Chief Justice of the United States, who, despite his whiteness, rather famously ended racial segregation in the schools. As for the richness of his life experiences, it may be that this father of six and children of immigrants didn’t have time for many — given that he served in the army in World War I; was elected Governor of California; ran for vice-president in 1948 on the Dewey ticket; and his father was murdered in a robbery when Warren was still a boy.
We’ll keep looking.
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Anyone who read Sotomayor’s entire speech (as opposed to just the excerpt) would know that she readily acknowledged the wisdom of Warren and other all white male courts.Anyone who read the entire speech would also have to acknowledge the other all white male courts who ruled foolishly and maybe so for the reasons she cited in the speech.
Sinz: Where is the evidence that Sotomayor is an “activist judge?” Are you already familiar with her vast body of work that you are able to conclude that she failed to follow the law in deciding cases and instead relied solely on empathy or some other impermissible factor?Short of any evidence, your claim sounds like nothing more than a reflexive talking point.
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joemarier // Jun 1, 2009 at 10:53 am
Yeah, they don’t get much more unempathetic than Holmes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
ottovbvs // Jun 1, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I consider Wendell Holmes one of the truly great justices to sit on the Supreme Court but he was a creature of his times just as Sotomayor is a creature of hers. He authored some opinions on racial issues which don’t look too good today but in the context of the era in which they were written they looked different. Quite honestly this is a totally silly little parlor game. The notion that the law is preserved in amber and can never reflect society’s changing mores is one of the most inane philosophies ever advanced. Strictly adhered to women would still not have the vote, 10 years olds would still work 14 hour days and blacks would be picking cotton as slaves. It’s totally fatuous.
Churl // Jun 2, 2009 at 1:36 am
See H.L. Mencken’s perceptive writeup on “The Great Dissenter”. Holmes sounds like the sort of justice that Obama would like on the bench.http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/holmes.htmlAn example, “they [the 1920's liberals] concluded that he was a sworn advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of the rights of lawmakers.”
sinz54 // Jun 2, 2009 at 8:06 am
New Majority seems to have gotten completely off the track on the Sotomayor nomination.NM is now focusing on whether you have to be female or a member of a minority in order to have “empathy,” and throws up counterexamples like Holmes.Who cares!!!The real issue is the “empathy” itself–and what that code word is intended to mean. If Obama had nominated a white male judge and said he had “empathy,” we should be just as concerned.Liberals use the word “empathy” to mean putting a thumb on the scales of justice, in favor of their favorite Protected Classes: Blacks, Hispanics, gays, and women. They don’t mean “empathy” for the victims of crime or terrorism; for the rights of the citizenry to conduct democratic processes without fear of intimidation (except when the intimidation is coming from the far right); or (in the Ricci case) for poor and working-class white folks. There are white folks in West Virginia and Appalachia who are poorer than black folks in many suburbs, but they don’t receive that “empathy” from the Left.That justice is blind is not always possible, but it should be an ideal we should strive to. But that the Supreme Court should be a vehicle to move America to the Left, complete with favors dispensed to favored Protected Classes, is something we conservatives should oppose with all our heart.