On the "eminent domain" (confiscation of private property) case of Didden v. Port Chester, Judge Sotomayor is, by necessity, undermining a key argument of her lefty backers about why "empathy" is needed. She is claiming, as she did in her incredibly brief actual ruling, that her decision against the original property owner was necessitated by the statute of limitations for filing his challenge to the "taking" of his property. (Her explanation if "by necessity" because her one-paragraph dismissal of his case on substantive grounds was so outlandish as to run completely afoul of even the minor restrictions acknolwedged in the terrible Kelo decision.) Even the statute of limitations claim is and always was absurd: By her lights, the clock started ticking merely when Didden's land was, in effect, zoned for possible taking, rather than when it was actually seized. By her lights, he would have had to challenge the taking before his own proposed land use was even disallowed and before the land was taken. That's an absurdity on its face.

But I digress. The reason such a bizarrely stringent obeisance to a supposed statute of limitations is problematic for her liberal backers is because they keep citing the Ledbetter decision as an example of why judges should take note of "real world" effects of their decisions and show "empathy" for the victim. But the Supreme Court in Ledbetter did exactly what Sotomayor did in the Didden case, namely applied a statute of limitations -- and one that was much more clear, much more unambiguous, than the strained reading Sotomayor put on the statute of limitations in the Didden case. So if she is going to go so overboard in [mis]applying a statute of limitations in Didden, how can the lefties say it is important to have an empathetic woman on the court in order to override unimportant things such as statutes of limitations in cases like Ledbetter's? Again, I have already heard the Demo senators at least twice make reference to Ledbetter in arguing in favor of Sotomayor. How can they make that argument but still defend her Didden ruling?

They can't.

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