Obama Scorned for High Court Nomination Comments

The Committee for Justice, the conservative group that was instrumental in promoting the Supreme Court nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, took aim this morning at Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama for comments he made during the justices' confirmation debates.

Curt Levey, the organization's executive director—in a line of attack conservative strategists have said will be part of the case against Obama they'll take into the general election if the Illinois senator is the nominee—said that the Democratic candidate's comments that the role of justice is to favor the weak over the strong and that Roberts and Alito's hearts "weren't in the right place" are anathema to jurisprudence.

"The job of a judge," Levey says, "is to dispassionately apply ... constitutional and statutory protections, not second-guess their authors." The "left," he said, wants to enshrine what is "in the judge's heart" as a "critical ingredient" in the law.

—Liz Halloran