A disappointed commentator
George Will on his disappointment with one of the presidential candidates in the matter of Judge Leslie Southwick:
Obama is not scary, just disappointing…His candidacy kindled hope that he might bring down the curtain on the long-running and intensely boring melodrama “Forever Selma,” starring Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It was hoped Obama would be impatient with the ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation that degrades racial discourse. He is, however, unoriginal and unjust…
Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate’s erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick’s “disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.” Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.
To some of Southwick’s opponents, his merits are irrelevant. They simply say it is unacceptable that only one of the 17 seats on the 5th Circuit is filled with an African American, although 37 percent of Mississippians are black. This “diversity” argument suggests that courts should be considered representative institutions, like legislatures, and that the theory of categorical representation is valid: People of a particular race, ethnicity or gender can be understood and properly represented only by people of the same category.
Southwick’s Senate opponents, having failed to find ammunition in any of his 985 opinions (Obama’s figure of 7,000 opinions is interestingly imprecise), cite two cases in which he joined other judges’ opinions. Both cases concerned the proper parameters of government agencies’ discretion…Obama is seeking the office from which federal judges are nominated. Southwick has explained himself, in writings and in testimony to the Senate. Now Obama has explaining to do.
There is something notable about the acidity and world-weariness evident in Will’s brief mention of the “long-running and intensely boring melodrama”.