Former ACORN fund raiser gets Obama judicial nomination. Yes, you read that right
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
11/13/09 9:13 AM EST
President Obama's first federal court nominee was Judge David Hamilton of Indiana. If you are drinking your morning coffee as you read what follows here, you might want to put down your cup before reading further:
Among Hamilton's "qualifications" is the fact that he is a former fund raiser for ACORN. That fact was conspicuously left out of the White House statement announcing Obama's nomination of the federal district judge for a position on the Seventh Circuit federal appeals court.
Even though it was only for a month, the fact Hamilton would work for any length of time for ACORN is disturbing. And there is no evidence that he has ever subsequently reputiadated his association with ACORN.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a Senate confirmation vote on Hamilton's nomination for Tuesday, Nov. 17.
As the American Civil Rights Union's Ken Klukowski details in an oped posted earlier this morning here on washingtonexaminer.com, Hamilton is an ACLU big-wig who also has a deeply hypocritical view of Christianity:
"He has also shown surprising hostility to people of Christian faith. He ruled that any prayers uttered in the Indiana statehouse that invoke the name of Jesus Christ are unconstitutional and cannot be permitted.
"Nor can anyone offer a prayer that is 'sectarian' or 'pervasively Christian.' Oddly, although prayers mentioning Jesus are somehow a threat to the republic, Judge Hamilton said that it’s okay to offer prayers to Allah."
Hamilton's various rulings are a good illustration of why so many social conservatives view attempts by the ACLU and other liberals to ban all expressions of Christian faith from the public square to be supremely bigoted and patently unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom.
A coalition of conservative leaders headed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese points to five reasons why Hamilton should not be confirmed:
· Judge Hamilton is an ideologue first and a jurist second. His rulings reflect his work for the ACLU and ACORN, and his rulings on the District Court often reflect his bias toward extreme leftist ideology. If anything, Judge Hamilton’s record has confirmed fears that he would be a liberal judicial activist who would impose his radical ACLU-inspired agenda from the bench.
· Judge Hamilton suppressed religious freedom: He expressed a bizarre hostility to religious speech by ruling that prayers to Jesus Christ offered at the beginning of legislative sessions violate the Constitution, but that prayers to Allah do not. In 1994 he denied a Rabbi’s plea to allow a Menorah to be part of the Indianapolis Municipal Building’s holiday display. In both cases the Seventh Circuit reversed Hamilton.
· Judge Hamilton’s ruling in criminal cases indicates that he attempts to find ways to be as lenient as possible in sentencing. In one case, where he was unanimously reversed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Hamilton disregarded a defendant’s prior conviction for a felony drug offense in order to avoid imposing a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment for persons convicted of a third felony drug offense.
· Judge Hamilton protected child predators: In one particularly troubling case, Judge Hamilton invalidated a common-sense law that would have required convicted sex offenders to provide information so that law enforcement could track their activity, thereby making it easier for child predators to move around and endanger children in Indiana. In another, Judge Hamilton urged the President to grant clemency for a police officer who had pled guilty to producing child pornography by videotaping and photographing sexual activity with two teenage girls.
· Judge Hamilton consistently sided with abortion-on-demand absolutists: Over a period of seven years, Judge Hamilton used his judicial role to wage a campaign against reasonable measures to reduce abortions, repeatedly ruling against a popular Indiana law requiring information and a waiting period before an abortion.
