President Barack Obama, whether you love him or hate him, has an impressive legal background. He studied Constitutional law at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1991, and was the first black editor of the Harvard law review some years later. President Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer for the law firms of Sidley Austin (where a young Michelle Robinson – later Michelle Obama – would be his advisor) and Miner, Barnhill, and Gallard, a top tier law firm according to a U.S. News and World Report ranking of the best law firms. Obama worked there for a short period of time while also working as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, one of the top 5 law schools in the country, from 1992-2004.
What all of this boils down to is that when it comes to constitutional and civil rights law President Obama knows his stuff and while many armchair political analysts would disagree with this, the facts speak for themselves. So, with his presidency coming to a close, and his impending retirement, what will Mr. Obama do? In my opinion, President Barack Hussein Obama should become the next supreme court justice.
Opportunity
Because of the lifelong appointment of Supreme Court justices, when discussing job openings for the highest court in the land, one must first look at age. Currently four of the Supreme Court justices – Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Stephen Brayer – are in their mid to late seventies meaning that the upcoming administration may have four Supreme Court seats to fill over the next eight years due to impending retirement or the alternative. President Obama, if nominated right now, would be only 54 years old, making him the second youngest member of the current court and by far the most accomplished. Of course, because the president nominates Supreme Court justices, President Obama would only have the possibility of joining justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsberg, as the democrats on the court if a democrat was elected president. This is the main issue that makes this election cycle one of the most important of all time.
Why You Should Want Him
President Obama represents something that no one else on the current court does, except for maybe justice Sotomayor. This is because President Obama was both a Constitutional law professor and a civil rights lawyer. These past few years we have seen some dramatic steps back in terms of civil rights, including the almost complete annihilation of the Voting Rights Act, which was helping to protect the vote of thousands of African-Americans in now disenfranchised communities. We have also seen some truly despicable racist rhetoric coming from the republican faction of the bench – well, to be honest it's always Justice Antonin Scalia – saying things like, "There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less – a slower track school where they do well," which is a direct quote from Justice Scalia in a recent supreme court case on Affirmative Action.
President Obama would be a radically different choice from any of the other Supreme Court justices in that he is a very careful man and a great politician. You can rest assured that this type of rhetoric would never come from his mouth as he not only is too polished to say it, he is vehemently against it. President Obama is also a fantastic legal mind (as illustrated in the opening paragraph) and is young enough to serve for a very long time. Any way you look at it, President Obama should be our next Supreme Court justice.
