Sonia Sotomayor, and the Curse of "Atlas Shrugged"

If Barack Obama was trying, completely and fully, to fulfill every requirement as outlined in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to destroy the United States, he couldn't have done a better job.

Let's look at his nominee for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, and her perception of what being a judge - and justice - is all about:

In a rambling 2001 speech, she disagreed with a colleague who thought judges should transcend their "personal sympathies and prejudices." Sotomayor said, "I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases."
She argued that "the aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others." In sum, she said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

So impartiality is impossible, life experience trancends law, to feel is better than to think. This is what Barack Obama is trying to do to what was once the law in the United States. He - along with Ms. Sotomayor - is pulling the blindfold off of Lady Justice, and whoring her out to meet their political ends.

Let's go to Atlas Shrugged, and the story of the book's great legal mind, Judge Narragansett, who left the bench after a controversial case:

Midas Mulligan owned the most successful bank in Chicago, Illinois, Hunsacker applied to Mulligan for a loan, and Mulligan refused. In his refusal, Mulligan told Hunsacker that his business record made him an extremely bad prospect for running a vegetable pushcart, much less a large factory that employed six thousand people...

Hunsacker, furious at the refusal, filed suit against Mulligan. He made a claim that the narrative describes as "discrimination."

Judge Narragansett, in charging the jury in that case, urged them, as strongly as the court rules allowed, to find for the defendant. He pointed out that qualifications on paper were only half the story of a loan application; the other half was risk, and Lee Hunsacker and his partners were, quite simply, bad business risks. And regardless of any particular person's grounds for assessing such risk, it was for Midas Mulligan and only Midas Mulligan to assess the risk that he should take. In Narragansett's view, freedom to trade included freedom not to trade, on any grounds whatever, rational or irrational.

Hunsacker's attorneys took exception to Judge Narragansett's jury charge, and appealed the judgment. The appellate court reversed the judgment...

The judge did not take the reversal lightly, and leaves the bench and disappears. He explains why, later:

"I quit when the court of appeals reversed my ruling. The purpose for which I had chosen my work, was my resolve to be a guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made me the executor of the vilest injustice conceivable. I was asked to use force to violate the rights of disarmed men, who came before me to seek my protection for their rights. Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.
Now I saw that justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit-because I could not have borne to hear the words 'Your Honor' addressed to me by an honest man."

Back to real life - sadly. Sonia Sotomayor is now likely headed to the Supreme Court, the court that would hear the likes of the appeals above. And there is no doubt she would rule exactly as Ayn Rand's fictional appeals court had.

How many good men will leave the bench - to be replaced by activists - because they feel that the law has been perverted? What will be left of the rule of law once Sotomayor's court reverses decsions based on the legal code, supplanted by decisions made by "moral empathy"?

Atlas Shrugged ends with America in ruins, and Judge Narragansett editing the Constitution to eliminate some of its ambiguousness. Must we too see such destruction before we realize the folly of what is being foisted upon us?