Reason #2 why I will not be voting for Barack Obama

Reason #2: One of the most important jobs of the president is to appoint judges. Yet Senator Obama doesn't seem to understand a judge's proper role.

Again, Terry Jeffrey of Cybercast News makes the case:

Obama's Class-War Court

When the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court came up in the Senate in 2005, Sen. Barack Obama argued that the role of a justice is to favor the "weak" over the "strong." . . .

So, in Obama's vision, who are the "weak" and who are the "strong"? Who deserves to win the "hearts" of Supreme Court justices? Who does not?

In contrast to his soaring campaign rhetoric about bringing America together, Obama's Senate speeches against Roberts and Alito revealed a polarizing vision of America. Minorities, women, employees and criminal defendants were among the weak, majorities, men, employers and prosecutors were among the strong. . . .

Rather than trying to get up-close-and-personal with Roberts, Obama should have listened more carefully to the judge's testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It clearly explained why judges must not consider who is "weak" and who is "strong" in a case, or consult their personal sympathies in making decisions that must be based on the facts and the law.

"Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them," said Roberts. "I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat."

If Obama becomes president, he will try to stack the court not with umpires, but with players who put their heart in every game -- consistently pitching and batting for Obama's favorite teams.

So to continue with the baseball analogy, if Senator Obama were in charge of hiring umpires for a game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, would he hire only those umpires who agreed that all close calls should go in favor of the Devil Rays, simply because they have a much smaller payroll than the Yankees? Baseball isn't supposed to work that way. Is this the way our court system should work?

Nevertheless, I can understand how a person could say that court cases are much more important than baseball games, so we should give the benefit of the doubt to the little guy. And I can very much sympathize with that point of view. But the problem I see is this: Who is the little guy? And who gets to decide who is the little guy? Obama might see the little guy as minorities, or the poor, and I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But he clearly doesn't include unborn children in the "little guy" category, while I and others would put them at the top of the list.

So then how about appointing judges who will follow the law and the facts of the case as impartially as they can, rather than trying to tilt the balance toward whoever their particular favored groups happen to be? Wouldn't that be the most fair approach for everyone, since we're not all going to agree on who falls into the "little guy" category?