Look, the right will do whatever it already does to complicate Obama's agenda. Whether it's a policy, program, or in this case, a SCOTUS pick. The difference between the right and left is that the right will never back down. Once the bluster is over the right will do everything within their power including filibuster, to stop a nominee. The left blustered up and down, in and out, over Roberts and Alito and then backed down. Don't expect that to happen with the right and an Obama pick. The right wll go to the bitter and nauseating end with their ideology.

A judge that actually cares about people? That's insane!

Do you suppose republicans ever look in the mirror and think "i'm arguing against empathy- how did i come to this?"

"Empathy" means that you don't consider factors other than whether a crime has been committed. If there is reasonable cause, then it's up to a jury to determine the facts.

So an "empathetic" judge might be more inclined to accept that someone "was just following orders" when they were committing a crime. An "empathetic" judge would allow the jury to consider whether it's reasonable to think a crime really wasn't a crime if some toadying lawyer said it wasn't. An "empathetic" judge would even pause to ponder whether the case should move ahead at all if people think the country would be better off "looking forward instead of backwards".

Hmmmmm . . . . Maybe the Republicans are right after all about not wanting a judge with "empathy".

There's been an abundance of empathy in the SCOTUS decisions already on record. Who would dispute the empathy from Judge Roberts in his overt coddling of Exxon? How could they have possibly known that a drunken captain could be that negligent? Scalia on the other hand often seems distraught over the plight of torturers being hindered by too many rules and regulations. Also there was the case of that poor little rich boy from Texas who almost won a presidential election and was then aided by an empathetic court.

I wonder if the Right wants the rest of us to empathize with their anti-empathy stance! -Kevo

I think the wingnuts are taking part of this nonsense right out of Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. Empathy was always bad in her book, because it meant you would take from the (deserving by virtue of being) rich, and give to the (undeserving by fault of being) poor. In the book, the heroes were characters with hard, unempathetic faces because they loved justice.

Wingnuts still haven't figured out that real people can have both empathy and justice.

I'm telling you, he needs an angry black woman. One with an intellect the size of a bus, and the empathy will take care of itself.

Isn't empathy, like, one of the core principles of Christianity?

Religion is like a tool for these people, to be put away in the drawer when it's not useful.

These astounding pricks(republicans) are politicizing the usage of a word. Definition of empathy-the power of identifying oneself mentally with(and so fully comprehending)a person or object of contemplation.
WTF we are in idiocracy. At what point do we stop paying any attention to these idiots other than the way you pay attention to not stepping in a pile of dog shit as your walking down a sidewalk.

There is actually a real example of what "empathy" would mean in a judge, I think, in a YouTube video of Harold Koh that Dahlia Lithwick posted on Slate.

Koh is making a point about the nature of the law (whether it is better to say in advance that X is specifically legal, IF....), and he uses a great example: my wife and I, he says, went away for a weekend and left our teenaged son with a car. He had a license, and naturally wanted permission to drive the car, and there was a discussion about getting medicine in the event of some medical emergency (certainly!), or just to take friends to see a movie (um, maybe...), and so on.

Mrs. Koh evidently found this sort of detailed, conditional authorization persuasive.

Judge Koh did not. IIRC, he said that he and his wife had a consensus-- no, we don't actually want him to drive the car while we are away. But there might be exceptions, which is where the mom and dad's differences appeared.

So the judge took the view that we should deny him permission to drive, SO WE CAN let him know that if he breaks the rules, he's going to need a very good explanation. Then, if he DOES drive without our permission, he's going to have to meet a standard, like "I had to go to the pharmacy to get something for an emergency" (personally, this is the one I'd want to see in more detail); or "gee, my friends and I desperately wanted to see Star Trek on opening night and nobody else could get wheels, cuz, um, their parents had refused permission...."

I'm not sure what the conservative or liberal position would be on this one, nor what a strict constructionist would say, but it DOES strike me as a real example of judicial philosophy, and a pretty fair example of what empathy means for a judge.

If he gets a nomination (second one, is my prediction), watch for it in the hearings.

Anyone else remember Justice Stevens announcing, on behalf of a unanimous court, that of course allowing a president to be sued in a civil case wouldn't be time-consuming for the president and wouldn't interfere with the operation of the presidency? That was a decision that was the product of a court composed entirely of theorists without any idea of how their decisions affect people in real life.

i think the key here is that the repugnants are into smug certainty...
have been for a long time.

empathy is like the rising of the sun...
a crucifix...
a stake through the heart, etc.

The Nightmare of Empathy

An excellent book title, I can't wait to read it solely based on the phrase!

Empathy is the difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals have it and conservatives don't.

Incidentally, empathy is a prerequisite for the application of the Golden Rule, which itself is the foundation of the Christian faith (among other faiths). Their lack of empathy is the reason that I'm skeptical about Republican claims to Christianity. One can't ridicule empathy while claiming to be a Christian.

Lack of empathy: the first step down the socio - path.

No principle is ever black and white to liberals. For you kids, there's always some gray area you use to make excuses for people.

This is a reminder of why I went into medicine instead of law. On the operating table, the patients didn't talk back and they didn't expect me to take their very special touchy-feely circumstances into consideration.

If they wanted surgery, it was my way or the highway.

Simple authority. Too much for you squishy people to grasp?

Fittingly, Mike K is a colorectal surgeon.

A judge that actually cares about people? That's insane!

Sympathy, empathy, or anything else that involves caring about or understanding your fellow human beings is completely absent from the GOP DNA.
All decisions should be made by divining the intent of the Founding Fathers, even though they all had different intents and beliefs, and purposely wrote the Constitution in broad terms without many specifics--because they knew that issues would arise that they never could have predicted. They were very smart in that regard.

Empathy is all well and good, unless it is for the unborn. The buck stops there.

You liberals sure like to use religion as a weapon - until you see something that you don't like about it. Then religion is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Find me a major religion that espouses abortion like you liberals. Find me one major religion that backs the Freedom of Choice Act. Just one.

And then we can talk about the use of religion as a political weapon.

^You never know, maybe Myke K practices it's love with women across Amurka (OBGYN).

There is a type of person who is entirely lacking in empathy. Such a person is called a "sociopath" or a "psychopath" and lacks any ability to either recognize or care about the capacity of other sentient beings to experience anything, including suffering. Torturing or killing other human beings, or animals, means nothing to a sociopath, since to him they are merely inanimate objects. Some sociopaths find that they enjoy torturing and killing others, and become serial killers.

The Republican rhetoric about "empathy" suggests that a sociopathic lack of empathy represents their ideal of judicial temperament.

The problem, it seems, is that the right simply doesn't understand the meaning of the word, at least as it's applied in this context.

The right understands the meaning of empathy in a cool, distant, non-empathetic way, and it reacts with antipathy. Empathy undermines the right's only core belief: selfishness (which is sometimes extended to members of the family, tribe, nation, or race, as long as they behave).

They are screaming because empathy recognizes reality and invites it inside, where it would disturb dreams of domination and riches.

McGruber wrote: "Find me a major religion that espouses abortion like you liberals. Find me one major religion that backs the Freedom of Choice Act. Just one."

That's easy -- Secular Animism, a religion that I invented.

Of course it is not yet a "major" religion, having only one official adherent, namely myself.

But give me time.

L. Ron Hubbard started small too.

Once I had a surgeon like Myke K. He blamed me for his failure to relieve my pain and it was obvious in every exam. Also he thought my intake of painkillers was an item to discuss and very alarming to him. However, his intake of mass quantities of anti depressants was above question, and boy was he riled at the suggestion!

Eventually I found a capable surgeon and never had any desire for painkillers after that. I suppose Myke K might suggest I overcame my terrible character flaw, you know, wanting pain medication when suffering from pain.

However, his intake of mass quantities of anti depressants was above question, and boy was he riled at the suggestion!

You had no business discussing the surgeon's own health issues. How dare you?

I would have dropped you immediately and noted on your chart for other physicians' information that you were a difficult patient. Since you lefties love that New York show of Jerry Ziegfeld's, you can figure out what that means for your future attempts to procure health care.

The irony. If Obama picks a woman with empathy, then she will be able to view the world from the perspective of a man. (given that empathy means being able to see the world as others do). Why do republicans fear this?

If Obama picks a woman with empathy, then she will be able to view the world from the perspective of a man.

Hilarious. Show me a woman in the history of the world who was able to do this.

If women could think of anyone besides themselves, I wouldn't be on my third marriage.

Most of the time I'm proud of being a doctor and of the work I've done over the years as a family physician and more recently a dermatologist. Then I read letters like those of MikeK and I want to pretend I'm really not a physician and that I belong to a different, more honorable profession...like RNC consultant.

Objecting to a call for judicial "empathy" seems absurd, but Lithwick's explanation of "empathy" is gobbledegook.

Then I read letters like those of MikeK and I want to pretend they're not the work of a parody troll

Fixed.

Exactly what Obama intended to happen when he framed the issue in this way. It is very hard to be against empathy--makes you look cruel. Now instead of talking about diversity--a hot button issue for conservatives and independents--we're talking about empathy, something most reasonable people believe is a good thing. Obama is absolutely brilliant at resetting the terms of a debate. As always he is playing to the middle--while speaking in code to the left.

The right has been forced to argue against "empathy," not a winning position outside of the 20% dead enders. If Sotomayor is nominated they will not be able to restrain themselves. The result--huge swaths of alienated Latino and women voters.

I ask Allan Snyder at 10:30 if he's able to tell us how the GOP is capable of "divining the intent of the Founding Fathers" without using empathy.

Perhaps he means psychic channeling of the dead?

Admittedly, such techniques WOULD be "beyond cutting edge" and there is a certain part of the electorate that might gravitate to the GOP if they are planning to express belief in the paranormal.

It makes sense to go in this direction with Bobby Jindal having paved the way for acceptance of exorcism into the Republican health care plan's mental health coverage.

Empathy is what the republicans and conservatives have been getting less and less of from everyone else the last few years. And they are getting less of it because they made it clear to everyone else that they didn't have any of it to give to anyone else.

Empathy is being able to walk a mile in another man's shoes, republicans would rather send the guy to prison for wearing different shoes, dispose of the shoes and send the prisoner the disposal bill.

Another important "E" word that's being overlooked here is equity. I'm not an attorney, but my understanding is that American jurisprudence involves principles of both law and equity, where equity gives judges some leeway to make decisions based on general rules of fairness rather than a strict interpretation of the law. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this.

At any rate, how could a person who's devoid of empathy even begin to go about applying principles of equity?

I think the exemplar for empathy is the story of Earl Warren, during the Brown case, visiting Gettysburg and finding out that his driver had to spend the night sleeping in the car because no hotel would lodge a black man.
And as we all know, Brown opened the floodgates to the nightmare of equality we have now.

It's simple. "Empathy" means that you couldn't render a tendentiously pro-business decision like Ledbetter and still look at yourself in the mirror.

Wanda Sykes for SCOTUS!

Following up on Gregory's comment, the irony about the Ledbetter decision is that the so-called conservatives on the court were dealing in a classic case of judicial activism with their majority opinion.

Great post, including what Dahlia Lithwick wrote.

Too many people -- more conservatives than libs, but some libs too -- think that empathizing with someone automatically means finding in their favor. It does not. Unfortunately, believing that way often leads people to steel themselves against feeling empathy (or, often, anything else), because they don't want to be predisposed to finding in favor of the person they're empathizing with.

Grrr!!! It's enough to make a person crazy!