John Yoo, Torture Enabler, Inquirer Columnist

And, according to mediamatters, a bad one.

In his latest column, Yoo comes out swinging with a baseball metaphor but strikes out with an old GOP talking point:

In 2007, candidate Obama declared that his judges would "recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African American or gay or disabled or old." When he announced Souter's retirement, the president stated he would nominate "someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives." Empathy is "an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."

In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts compared judges to neutral umpires in a baseball game. Sen. Obama did not vote to confirm Roberts or Alito, but now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game, or to the idea of a rule of law that is blind to the identity of the parties before it.

Empathy has a proper place in other areas of life, such as medicine or charitable work. And the law does take account of a party's identity when necessary - in deciding whether someone has suffered racial or gender discrimination, for example. But judges should not apply these rules differently in individual cases because of the skin color, or sex, or religion of the plaintiff or defendant.

We've seen this argument before. It, of course, ignores what President Obama actually said:

I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role.

But mediamatters has more:

But Yoo was not nearly as negative about demonstrations of empathy by a judge when he described the reasoning behind the judicial decisions of Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Yoo clerked. To the contrary, in a review of Thomas' 2007 memoir, My Grandfather's Son (HarperCollins) -- in which Yoo praised Thomas' "unique, powerful intellect" and commitment to "the principle that the Constitution today means what the Framers thought it meant" -- Yoo touted the unique perspective that he said Thomas brings to the bench. Yoo wrote that Thomas "is a black man with a much greater range of personal experience than most of the upper-class liberals who take potshots at him" and argued that Thomas' work on the court has been influenced by his understanding of the less fortunate acquired through personal experience.

John Yoo, torture enabler, bad columnist, and now hypocrite.