Rule of law and ruling out Presidential candidates

After reading this poignant Thomas Sowell quote about the McCain candidacy,

"Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain,"

this Jonah Goldberg op/ed ("Courting Disaster" on National Review Online) was pretty timely:

"What is staggering, or at least should be, is that Stevens freely admits that he no longer considers “objective evidence” or even the plain text of the Constitution determinative of what is or isn’t constitutional: “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” is unconstitutional.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in a blistering response, justifiably exclaimed that, “Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat.”

I say “justifiably” rather than “accurately” because I think we hear purer expressions of the principle that “good” judges are those who make it up as they go along all the time. Consider Barack Obama. The Democratic front-runner and former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago has explained his thinking toward judicial appointments thusly: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, 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’ll be selecting my judges.”

When defending his vote against Justice John Roberts’ confirmation, Obama explained that the standard for a justice must be “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

Now that is a pure expression of the principle of judicial fiat."

. . . .

Five of the last seven presidents have been Republicans at least nominally committed to appointing conservative justices. Some have fallen short in that department (though not President George W. Bush), which is why the Supreme Court today hangs in the balance. John McCain could conceivably make the mistake of appointing a Souter or a Stevens or some other justice who sees the Constitution as an ink blot. But the key difference between McCain and his Democratic rivals is that he promises not to appoint such justices. Clinton and Obama consider it among their top priorities. That’s at least one reason for saying this is one of the most important elections in a very long time.