It is said that you can judge a man by the company that he keeps. I wonder if that also applies to the judicial nominees that he supports!
Obama nominated Cornelia Pillard to the 11 member US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on June 4, 2013, and thanks to Harry Reid’s nuclear option to fast-track Obama’s judicial nominees, she was confirmed in December. During his announcement, Obama said Pillard’s career “has been defined by an unshakeable commitment to the public good” and noted that once confirmed, she would “continue the D.C. Circuit’s strong tradition of distinguished scholars. . .”
So what is this “public good” that had Obama so excited? Obama let it be known at a private Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser last year that his intention is to remake the courts in his image. With the confirmation of Pillard, he made a giant leap in that direction.
Pillard, an avid supporter of a woman’s right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, wrote a law review article in 2007 asserting that abortion would play a central role in “freeing women” from routine conscription into maternity. She also believes that any infringement on a woman’s right to murder her unborn baby at will is discrimination against women “as a class of presumptive breeders” rather than breadwinners and citizens. She also dissed ultrasounds as “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being [human].
To compare motherhood to “conscription,” which implies mandatory, involuntary service or even slavery, should be offensive to women everywhere.
As an alternative to that Christian “abstinence-only” orientation which she feels is “permeated with stereotyped messages and double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior,” Pillard wants federal judges to force public schools to institute “egalitarian sex education” that affirms, among other things, the value of sexual pleasures. In truth, Pillard wants Christian and family values removed from the schools which is pretty much what Obama has already achieved by putting homosexuals and Murder, Inc. in charge of our children’s sex education.
In 2011-12, Pillard was enraged about a Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause prevented ministers from suing their churches under anti-employment discrimination laws because churches and other religious groups must be free to choose their own leaders without government interference. Pillard wrote that the Court’s decision upholding First Amendment free exercise of religion represented “a substantial threat to the American rule of law.”
Pillard has argued that the government should use an anti-Ku Klux Klan statute to bar pro-life protesters from holding rallies. She claimed of course that she wasn’t comparing pro-life supporters with the KKK but the KKK statute was the only ammunition available to “target militant” pro-lifers.
The founding Academic Co-director and Professor at the London-based Center for Transnational Legal Studies, Pillard is for shifting to international law as a legitimate basis for the formulation of public policy in the U.S. A cofounder, Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, agrees that international law would serve as a check to the “age of greed” brought about by American “hegemony,” and would focus on the need to institute the United Nation’s environmentally sustainable economic development under Agenda 21.
According to Anna Higgins, in an article at the Hill, “Pillard manipulates the Constitution to justify her radical and, frankly, absurd beliefs. Her ideas are not merely liberal fare, they are dangerous. The fact that Pillard connects her views to constitutional jurisprudence, which she would be responsible for administering if she were confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, should easily defeat her confirmation to that Court. It would be irresponsible for Congress to rubber-stamp the judicial confirmation of anyone who would steamroll the Constitution to advance a radical ideology.”
America’s defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty. But many left leaning judges have subordinated liberty to majority rule.
Judicial activism occurs when judges write subjective policy preferences into the law based on personal or political consideration rather than apply the law impartially according to its original meaning, usurping the powers of the elected branches of government and in turn the voters. At its heart, judicial activism at the federal level rests upon the idea that the Constitution is an ‘evolving, living’ document that must change with the times and the needs of society as perceived by activist judges.
Activist judges have erroded traditional values and freedoms through broad interpretation of the Constitution to include personal liberties not explicity enumerated. They have usurped powers from the elected branches of government changing rule of law to the rule of judges. They have forgotten, much like the elected branches of government, their oath to uphold the principles of the US Constitition and have instead made it their mission to fundamentally change America to fit the vision of the left.
