Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced Friday that he will retire at the end of the summer session and said, “I shall retire from regular active service as an associate justice … effective the next day after the court rises for the summer recess this year.”

        President Obama has said that he plans to replace Stevens with a justice who “knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”            

You might be thinking, “Wait a minute, isn’t a court justice supposed to be an advocate for the Constitution rather than an advovate for ordinary citizens?” But, of course, our president would never let a pesky little thing like the Constitution – the overriding document that is supposed to be the highest power in our government – get in the way of good ol’ progressive politics.

    Obama’s first priority should be trying to appoint someone who will attempt to correctly interpret the law of the land. He should not be appointing someone who, as he said Friday at the White House, understands how “the law affects the daily lives of the American people.”

Unfortunately, understanding how “the law affects the daily lives of the American people,” isn’t really in a justice’s job description. Understanding what the law is and applying it correctly regardless of how it affects or does not affect the daily lives of the American people, however, is. Regardless of the personal feelings of the Supreme Court justices, they exist to correctly interpret the meanings and intents behind the law, not to change the law according to their every whim.

Obama’s statements hardly come as a surprise, however – especially after his appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. When he appointed her last year, Obama was more concerned about making sure that the Supreme Court had enough justices with a proper sense of “empathy” than with a proper sense of what the laws are, and said, “We need somebody who’s got the heart and the empathy, to 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. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Sotomayor, you may remember, proved her worth – or lack thereof – months before becoming a Supreme Court justice when she dismissed a discrimination lawsuit brought by a group of white firefighters – a lawsuit that the Supreme Court took on, ruling in favor of the white firefighters that Sotomayor was so unwilling to even hear from.

With only 41 Republicans in the Senate, it will take all of them to effectively block a Supreme Court nominee, assuming the President has the full support of the Democrats. Therefore, I encourage you to write to your Senators and ask them to oppose any Supreme Court nominees who are willing to put their own political desires ahead of the law.

Instead of appointing a candidate who does not allow for the voices of ordinary citizens to be drowned out, let’s hope that Obama appoints someone who does not allow the words of the Constitution to be drowned out.

Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt.