Barack Obama, Doubting Thomas

Barack Obama, Doubting Thomas


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Politics: Sen. Obama joins the high-tech lynch mob that still thinks Clarence Thomas is unfit for the Supreme Court. The ex-state legislator with no accomplishments to his name dares to question Thomas' experience.

The issue of Supreme Court appointments had faded into the background until Saddleback Church founder Rick Warren at a weekend forum asked the presidential candidates which sitting Supreme Court justice they wouldn't have appointed. What Barack Obama answered should rally the GOP base and scare the rest of middle America.

"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was an exp . . . a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation," Obama replied, catching himself before the "e" word — experience — fell from his teleprompter-trained lips.

Even he knows that Clarence Thomas is eminently more qualified to sit on the Supreme Court than Obama is to sit in the Oval Office.

Before he was elevated to the nation's highest court in 1991, Thomas had worked in the office of Missouri's attorney general, served as an assistant secretary of education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court.

Rachel Brand, an assistant attorney general under Bush the elder, called Obama's comments "condescending" and noted that Thomas had already been confirmed by the Senate to three different positions before he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Obama also said he wouldn't have appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

"I would not nominate Justice Scalia," he said, "although I don't think there's any doubt about his intellectual brilliance, uh, because he and I just disagree."

Uh, did Obama just call Clarence Thomas dumb? Where's the media gaffe patrol?

Obama's credentials include being elected editor of the Harvard Law Review. Interestingly, the volume that Obama edited (No. 104, 1990-91) is the least cited of that prestigious legal publication in the last 20 years.

Legal scholar Obama also said of Thomas: "I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the Constitution." One of those interpretations involves gun control.

In the 5-4 Heller decision, Thomas determined with the majority that the Second Amendment's "right to bear arms" was an individual right and therefore the District of Columbia's gun ban was unconstitutional.

In a February debate, moderator Leon Harris of Washington television station WJLA asked Obama: "You said in Idaho recently — I'm quoting here — 'I have no intention of taking away folks' guns.' But you support the D.C. gun ban, and you've said that it's constitutional."

Obama nodded as Harris spoke and said, "Right, right." Obama was, in fact, saying that the Second Amendment is wrong, wrong.

On the political front, Obama has been no groundbreaking profile in courage. As David Ignatius of the Washington Post has written, after being elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, Obama "gained a reputation for skipping tough votes." Interestingly, these included a key gun-control vote in December 1999 because he was vacationing in his home state of Hawaii.

Ignatius quotes a Chicago politician as saying that "the myth developed that when there was a tough vote, he was gone." Obama is the Illinois state senator who voted "present" some 135 times lest he be forced to take a position he would have to intellectually explain and defend.

At Saddleback in Lake Forest, Calif., McCain named the four most liberal members of the Supreme Court — John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter — as judges he would not have appointed.

Obama would appoint justices who would rewrite the liberals' "living Constitution" while legislating from the bench on issues from gun control to national security. It's Obama who lacks the judgment and experience for the position he seeks.



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