The folks at ThinkProgress have done an admirable job of exposing Karl Rove’s latest bit of hypocrisy here. Seems Karl no longer feels that the President’s choice for the Supreme Court deserves absolute deference. No surprise there, and in any event, exposing Rovian hypocrisy makes shooting fish in a barrel look like rocket science.
But while he was burnishing his hypocrite’s credentials, Rove also perfectly summarized the Republican constitutional philosophy.
In fact, this is going to be one the big dividing lines. President Obama…said he wanted a judge who would uphold the Constitution, but also a judge would be empathetic. These two things are in conflict.
The word “empathetic” derives from “empathy”, which my dictionary defines as follows:
Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.
Rove has it right here, at least from the perspective of the right. Their constitutional philosophy is bottomed in a refusal to empathize- a refusal to either attempt to understand the situation of others or accept that the law must address the real world problems of real people. The conservative legal philosophy is one that insists on cramming people into artificial legal constructs rather than crafting legal constructs to deal with realities.
A system of law that is based on a refusal or inability to see the world from another’s perspective, to walk in that person’s shoes, so to speak, is one that will in time grow increasingly rigid and prevent the society as a whole from adequately responding to new challenges. The society grows ossified. If our legal system and our law is to evolve properly, empathy is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
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