empathy

The Senate is set (in a few minutes) to vote on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) just took to the chamber floor to explain once more why he’s voting against her. Here’s a hint: It starts with “E” and ends in “Y.”
As I’ve said, empathy is a fine [...]

As promised, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) today issued his full statement explaining why he will vote not to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court justice.
After a lengthy dissertation denouncing Democrats for blocking the confirmation of previous Republican nominees, McConnell said that despite his strong belief that the president is entitled to great deference [...]

From Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker comes this simple but not-much-discussed observation: Empathy is not, as some seem to think, a scourge peculiar to Hispanic females. Indeed, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is as empathetic as Sonia Sotomayor, Parker appropriately pointed out yesterday, the only distinction being that their empathies rest with different folks.
Senators also hammered [...]

Republicans and Democrats both see code in key words.

Ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), following the introduction of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor by Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), warned that empathy is prejudice, identity is discrimination, and every statement ever made by a nominee can and will be used against her.

To follow up on my post yesterday about whether liberals may end up disappointed with a Justice Sonia Sotomayor (an argument E.J. Dionne also makes today in The Washington Post), the case I mentioned — and that Glenn Greenwald writes about today (he also litigated it before Judge Sotomayor in 1999) — merits a closer [...]

President Obama listed a variety of qualities that he is looking for in a Supreme Court justice, but conservatives have successfully hammered the left with just one — “empathy.”

The attacks keep coming on Obama and his presumptive Supreme Court nominees (such as Sonia Sotomayor, who I wrote about today) who the president expects to be “empathetic,” of all crazy things.
Here’s RNC chairman Michael Steele’s empathic view of the whole “crazy nonsense empathetic” thing, as he put it while guest hosting on Bill Bennet’s [...]