Mitch McConnell Warns Barack Obama on Judicial Nominees

The top Senate Republican, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), told a conservative legal group that Senate Republicans would hold President-elect Barack Obama's nominees for federal judgeships to time honored standards of judicial temperament and qualification. McConnell was careful to say that Republicans would not resort to "extra-Constitutional" means to block Obama's appointees, as Democrats did to more than a dozen of President Bush's judicial nominees. But he did signal that the smaller Senate Republican caucus has no intention of allowing Obama to fill the courts with his judges completely unchallenged.

At issue is the proper role for federal judges in deciding political questions usually reserved for the legislative and executive branches of government. Republicans and conservatives believe strongly that judges should be impartial arbiters of the law, refraining from activism and making law from the bench. In recent years, however, Democrats have placed a much greater emphasis on a nominee's political ideology, in an effort to keep qualified conservative judges off the federal bench. That emphasis was demonstrated in remarks Obama made on the campaign trail when he told a Planned Parenthood conference that as president he intended to nominate candidates who had displayed "empathy."

"We 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 choosing my judges."

McConnell disagrees. He argues that what is needed instead is someone who understands the law and is willing to apply it impartially, even if that means going against personal beliefs and preferences.

McConnell questioned whether nominees chosen by Obama's empathy standard would be capable of living up to the judicial oath.

"Republicans have always insisted the judicial oath means what it says, and we will continue to insist on it.

If President Obama's top criteria in selecting nominees is empathy then the burden will be on them to demonstrate that their political beliefs do not trump the even-handed reading of the law. There is one side judges should be on, just one side--and that's the side of the law."

McConnell's comments forshadow a looming battle over Supreme Court nominations, of which President Obama is expected to get at least one in his first term. As a Senator, Obama voted against Chief Justice John Roberts' confirmation, and voted with the losing side to sustain a filibuster of Justice Robert Alito's confirmation. Those votes placed him among the most liberal members of the Democratic caucus. With that record, Obama can hardly expect kid glove treatment of his judicial nominees, and McConnell is all but promising that he will not get it.