Doug Kendall and longtime KamaAina fave Dahlia Lithwick dissect the repukes' poutrage over "judicial empathy' in Slate.
http://www.slate.com/id/2218393/pagenum/allPity poor Frank Ricci. You probably already do. Ricci is a white firefighter from New Haven, Conn., who is the plaintiff in an important civil rights case before the Supreme Court this term. Ricci suffers from dyslexia, which made passing a written exam established by New Haven for promotion to lieutenant especially challenging for him. He studied hard and got the sixth-highest score on the exam—qualifying him for one of the eight open spots. But despite all that, Ricci still hasn't received his promotion, which is the basis of his lawsuit....
So why did every report on the case begin and end with Ricci's compelling employment story? Might it have something to do with the fact that the conservative organizations supporting Ricci used his sympathetic tale as the centerpiece of a successful media blitz leading up to oral argument before the court? Could it be that they wanted to make sure the justices understood just how Title VII could impact the lives of ordinary Americans like Frank Ricci? Could they—oh the horror!—have wanted the justices to empathize with Ricci's plight?
We have heard a great deal this week from the right about the stomach-churning evils of empathy. How it's a call to "emotive," lawless, unhinged judicial conduct that turns the federal bench into a cross between Oprah's studio and a lunatic asylum. The quality of empathy—which President Obama has said is a priority in a Supreme Court pick—has been derided, mocked, scorned, and brought into close contact with Michael Steele's behind. Which makes it rather problematic when you consider that conservatives have in fact been playing the empathy card a lot more effectively than progressives in recent years.
The truth is that conservative organizations have been beating the hell out of their liberal counterparts in the empathy game for some time now. More Americans can probably identify Susette Kelo and Wilhelmina Dery as the plaintiffs who had their homes snatched by the government in an eminent domain case in 2005 than can name any Supreme Court justice. That case, Kelo v. New London, had absolutely nothing to do with the adorableness of Kelo's Victorian house and the tenacity with which she fought to keep it. But to read about it in the press, you'd think Justice David Souter himself showed up on Kelo's doorstep, punched her in the mouth, then moved into her home and ate off her good china.Jailhouse lawyer KamaAina thinks Ricci should have relied on the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA); unfortunately, the Reagan/Bush courts have largely emasculated it :grr: , so Ricci must have felt -- correctly, as it turned out -- that he had a better shot at victory by playing the race card.
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