New York Times: President Obama and Senate both know that “due process of the law” is a sham

How else does one interpret this report in the New York Times of a squabble between President Obama and the Senate over appellate court nominees?

To think of it, why won’t the Senate just approve whomever the president nominates? After all, what is judging but examining the argument of the plaintiff, comparing it to the argument of the defendant, and awarding victory to the side with a stronger argument? If so, all that’s needed in a nominee is a reasonably strong powers of logical thinking. So is it that the senators think that president’s candidates are deficient in their mental abilities?

The very way you put the question, dear reader, reveals that you have no clue as to the actual nature of judging – which is the process of deciding the issue irrespective of what the plaintiff and the defendant say. (Their exchange of very learned legal and factual argument for which they have to pay lawyers thousands upon thousands of dollars in foolish expectation that victory is theirs if their argument is more sound because they naively expect that judge “impartially” considers their argument, is just for the show) – judging is done not by operation of logic, but by judges’ whim (or “convictions,” which is exactly the same); the judge than simply concocts a plausible justification in the “opinion and order” based on “law” and “facts” of judges’s own invention, that has no basis whatsoever in parties’ actual factual and legal argument, or for that matter, in actual reality. Anything goes in the so-called “due process of the law” – the “process” which is totally unencumbered by demands of fact, or logic, or honesty, or decency.

(If anything, the “due process of the law” seems to be one continuous violation of the ironclad, axiomatic rule of judging – that a judge cannot be a party to the case brought before him.)

In other words, because the judicial “procedure” – if it can be called so – is utterly arbitrary, and because both the republicans and the democrats understand this, they want to use this arbitrary feature of the so-called “due process of the law” to their advantage. If a democrat is appointed, one set of decisions will be declared consistent with the Constitution; if a Republican one, exactly the opposite decisions will be discovered to conform to it. Hence, much more is at stake than whose friend will get the nicely-paying sinecure and feed at the government’s trough. This is about which party will get the arbitrary power to read into laws what they like, and pull the country in their direction.

The stakes being that high, the president and the senate have every reason to get into each other’s hair; for the details of the current such dust-up I’ll refer you to the above-mentioned, highly amusing article on judicial horsetrading.

Amusing it may be. But no matter who wins, the justice loses. For does it really matter who will triumphantly trample justice into dirt – republican, or democrat judges?