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BY MICHAEL HAYNE

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

Combine a contentious presidential election year where both sides appear to be as committed to their ideologies as ever with aging Supreme Court justices, and you’ve got yourself quite a quandary. Being president means you get to start wars, nominated ambassadors, appear on TV during otherwise great programming, and nominate Supreme Court justices. So naturally it’s very much a consideration with regards to the presidential race.

It’s really no national secret that the highest court in the land has been bought by corporate america as demonstrated by the Citizens United ruling--allowing unlimited corporate campaign cash without disclosing donors--that the Justices should start going Nascar and donning all their corporate sponsors on their robes. But the court has also made some surprising decisions, most notably the decision of Justice Roberts siding with Obama’s signature health care legislation. This is where it gets nasty.

Despite the fact that he created the same mandates for his own state of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney has played into the hands of the rabid right and has promised to repeal the law. Even though Romney has stated that he would nominate justices in the vein of Roberts, he openly criticized Roberts’ decision to side with the majority of HCR.

“I’ll nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice [John] Roberts," Romney had said.

But he told CBS News this past summer that Roberts made "political considerations" in authoring the health care ruling. The Republican nominee supplemented his thoughts on the kinds of judges he would appoint.

"I'd look for individuals who have the intelligence and believe in following the Constitution," he said, according to CNN.

President Obama is less than thrilled with the rightward shift on the bench and the number of conservatives drinking the turpentine-laced Kool-Aid, so obviously getting reelected and preventing Romney from stuffing the court with even more corporate-friendly ideologues is of pressing concern. One name that pops out is Kamala Harris, the Golden State's elected attorney general.

So who the hell is Harris and why should you care?

The part Asian, part African-American woman has been praised for her political savvy, ethnic background, telegenic personality, law enforcement credentials, and early support of Obama's 2008 candidacy.

"If Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg does retire, or President Obama gets another appointment, I do think Kamala Harris is the most likely to be put on," said Thomas Goldstein, who generated buzz when he analyzed Harris at length eight months ago in his well-respected legal blog. "The California attorney general has the most political experience, which is really missing on the court right now," she told CNN. "She's diverse, she's young -- I think kind of a female Barack Obama in some sense."

With women’s reproductive rights being flargatly ripped away (apparently it’s Big Uterus that Republicans hate) and a steady erosion of our Constitutional freedoms under both Bush and Obama, the man in the oval office will certainly impact the fate of the country when he chooses the next Justice.

Michael Hayne is a Comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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