April 1st 2009
Obama’s “Moderate” First Bench Nominee
The New York Times has looked over the career of David F. Hamilton, now the U.S. District Judge from southern Indiana, soon to be Obama’s first judicial appointment (to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago), and has decreed him to be “moderate.”
Well, not really moderate, but “said by lawyers to represent some of his state’s traditionally moderate strain.” If you’re going to believe that, you have to accept the word of unnamed sources who just happen to be lawyers. Yeah, I’m with you on that. And he apparently only represents “some” of that “moderate strain,” not all of it. And you’ll have to accept that a strain can be moderate. A strain in your knee, perhaps.
As it turns out – no surprise here! – the NYT was manufacturing moderateness out of whole cloth. The first Obama appointee to the federal bench is no more moderate than the man who’s appointing him. The blog The Real Barack Obama has done all my homework for me on a thorough analysis of David Hamilton and found all sorts of radical background and belief in this would-be moderate.
Hamilton started off as an ACORN organizer. Coincidence? Then he was VP for litigation and a board member of the Indiana chapter of the ACLU. That’s one strange strain of moderateness. Then, he got nominated to the bench by that lawyer among lawyers, Bill Clinton. NRO comments:
In 1994, when President Clinton nominated him to the district court, the ABA rated him as ‘not qualified,’ apparently because of his almost purely political (as opposed to legal and judicial) experience.
But that didn’t stand in Hamilton’s way. From the bench, he invalidated an Indiana law requiring the registration of sex offenders, and prevented another from being enforced that required information and a waiting period before an abortion. And he ruled to suppress evidence that would have convicted a cocaine trafficker – a ruling that was overturned unanimously by the court Obama now wants to appoint him to.
I’m straining to find the moderate in this man.
Oh, and he also very moderately ruled that the Indiana House of Representatives was not allowed to include prayers that included the name of Jesus. That ruling also didn’t make it through the Court of Appeals in Chicago. Interestingly – horrifyingly, but certainly not moderately – Hamilton somehow found that prayers to Allah were no problem at all.
This “moderate” is exactly the sort of judge anyone who followed Obama could tell was coming: soft on criminals, uncaring about the Constitution, an enemy of the First Amendment (and probably the Second).
And he’s just the first. Elections have consequences.
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