The conservonuts are unleashing themselves after Obama's judicial pick......before Obama has even made an announcement. Their complaint? We can't have someone who actually cares about people.

I consider myself a fairly rational person, by which I mean that I mostly like to use reason and facts to reach conclusions and to make arguments. However, reason and emotion can often be reconciled with just the right touch. This reconciliation represents an important quality that Obama wants to see in his replacement for Souter. Obama wants someone who understands the law, obviously, but also someone who understands that law has an intimate relationship with society. To Obama, law is not simply an abstraction. It is a key social force that often has a fundamental impact on how we live our lives. Sounds simple enough, right? Not if you're Republican apparently.

The looncases were out in full force attacking Obama's comments. Senator Orin Hatch (R-Utah) wondered "What does that mean? Usually that’s a code word for an activist judge." Right-wing hack Carol Liebau wrote an article in Townhall with the glaring headline ""Empathetic" Justices Threaten our Freedom." According to Liebau, a judge who is empathetic must be a leftist:

By invoking a comfortably-undefined “empathy” as the indispensable quality in a justice, President Obama is deftly deploying warm, fuzzy rhetoric to signal that he intends to select a justice with a very specific left-wing policy agenda.

For the record, I do hope that Obama appoints a hardcore liberal to the bench, even though that's highly unlikely to happen. Most likely we're going to get a center-left liberal akin to Souter. But empathy of the kind that Obama seeks is not exclusively confined to leftists. Being tuned in to the lives of ordinary people is not a partisan quality. It's a quality meant to delineate between career justices and executive leaders. For the first time in quite a good many years, we may get a governor or some other similar politician appointed to the court, which used to be standard practice several decades ago. Presidents have settled on career justices recently, but Obama may be looking to buck that trend. When he says he wants someone empathetic, don't take it to mean he wants a leftist. Do take it to mean that he wants someone who understands the difficulties that people struggle through every day.