Empathy: The projection of one’s own feelings or emotional state onto an object.
“Empathy v. Impartiality” pretty much says it all, and you don’t really have to read Jonah Goldberg’s column with this 
title to understand the problem.
The reasoning here is a riot of dubious assumptions. Obama and Sotomayor both assume that a firsthand understanding of the plight of the poor or the African-American or the gay or the old will automatically result in justices voting a certain (liberal) way. “I would hope,” Sotomayor said in 2001, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” This is not only deeply offensive, it is also nonsense on stilts. Clarence Thomas understands what it is like to be poor and black better than any justice who has ever sat on the bench. How’s that working out for liberals?
It used to be that justice was blind, but the absence of vision seems to have migrated to the other branches of government.
Image by mafleen - Creative Commons
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