EDITORIAL: Another judicial radical

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By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Another day, another Obama nominee who doesn't appear to love America. Another nominee who thinks the United States is inherently racist. Another nominee who thinks that judges should let their "ethnic and racial background" have an effect on how they conduct their trials. President Obama's radicalization of American government needs to be stopped.

In this case, the nominee is Northern California federal district court nominee Edward Chen, forwarded by the Senate Judiciary Committee to the full Senate last Friday on a party-line vote. Mr. Chen is currently a federal magistrate in San Francisco, and a lawyer long active with the American Civil Liberties Union before that.

Judge Chen's words speak for themselves. When the congregation sang "America the Beautiful" at a funeral, Judge Chen told the audience of his "feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted with appeals to patriotism - sometimes I cannot help but feel that there are too much [sic] injustice and too many inequalities that prevent far too many Americans from enjoying the beauty extolled in that anthem."

In a speech on Sept. 22, 2001, he said that among his first responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America was a "sickening feeling in my stomach about what might happen to race relations and religious tolerance on our own soil. ... One has to wonder whether the seemingly irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating which has [sic] recurred so often in our history can be effectively restrained."

And talking about the role of judges, he in effect embraced the "empathy standard" that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was forced to denounce in her own confirmation hearings: "Simply put, a judge's life experiences affect the willingness to credit testimony or understand the human impact of legal rules upon which the judge must decide. These determinations require a judge to draw upon something that is not found in the case reports that line the walls of our chambers. Rather judges draw upon the breadth and depth of their own life experience.... Inevitably, one's ethnic and racial background contributes to those life experiences."

You get the picture. To quote and paraphrase Sen. Charles E. Schumer from another occasion, this man's attitude "doesn't even whisper 'judge.' " Instead, it yells out that he is a biased radical willing to impose his own politics from the bench. Judge Chen should not be confirmed.