Mr. Obama and his aides responded by denouncing her critics while saying she had used a poor choice of words. “I’m sure she would have restated it,” Mr. Obama said on Friday. “But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what’s clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through — that will make her a good judge.”

The White House and its liberal supporters also dug up quotes from Republican-appointed justices, including Samuel A. Alito Jr., who said at his confirmation hearing that his immigrant roots played into his consideration of cases.

“When a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases,” he said at the hearing, “I can’t help but think of my own ancestors because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position.”



Its silly to think a person's past experiences wont
in someway affect judgement. The Supreme Court
takes on the very toughest cases. If the cases were
easy, they would all be 9-0.

This pontification about the Supreme Court having
to view the Constitution in a perfectly sterile way is
absurd, yet this is basically what we are fed.

If everything is so darn clear why do we have all these
5-4 decisions with dissents and opinions dressed up
by very good writers in order to appear to lack any political
or personal bias...

If you follow the Supreme Court you can usually pick which
judge voted where as long as the legal question is made clear.
Occasionally there are some surprises.