The American Spectator

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Coming and Going

By Joseph Lawler on 7.14.09 @ 10:51AM

William McGurn bravely ventures into the funhouse-style rules of liberal judicialism in today's Wall Street Journal. He points out that the fact that Sotomayor is Catholic allows for a direct comparision between the way she is being treated in the confirmation process and the way that another known papist, John Roberts, was questioned. 

To sum up McGurn's attempt to encapsulate the liberal Senators' varying attitudes toward the two nominees:

John Roberts: Catholic, professed that judges should not bring own moral feelings to bear on cases = Romanist sleeper trying to usher in theocracy through the bench.

Sonia Sotomayor: Catholic, subscribes to the liberal judicial philosophy that judges have a responsibility to consider moral feelings (or empathy?) in deciding = judicial moderate, there's no problem with six of nine judges being Catholic even though that's exactly the pope's plan.

What's the difference between the two? Apparently it is that Roberts appeared to be devout (the evidence being, apparently, that his wife was a member of "Feminists for Life") and that Sotomayor doesn't seem to take the rules coming from Rome too seriously.

In other words, to impose any kind of coherence on the liberals' Calvinball rules of judicial philosophy, you must accept the premise that a judge of religious background is fine as long as he doesn't care about the rules of his religion very much. (Then of course you have to ignore that being a judge is all about caring about rules.)