Sniping of Sotomayor begins
So much for restraint and reserving judgment. Even before President Obama nominated federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a conservative group blasted her as a “liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.” Actually, given their party’s stunning erosion in Hispanic support, Senate Republicans may want to weigh very carefully whether her nomination is a battle they want to fight.
Sotomayor, 54, would be the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the court. She has a compelling American dream personal story: Puerto Rican parents who moved to New York when she was a child; losing her father at age nine; growing up in public housing in the Bronx, going on to Princeton and Yale law.
She was a prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office and, as the White House repeatedly points out, named to the federal district bench by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and to the appeals bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998, when seven of the current Republican senators voted for her. It was also noted that Sotomayor has more experience on the bench than any of the current justices had when they were nominated.
If there is an impediment to her nomination, it was unwittingly provided by Obama a month ago when, while musing about what kind of judge he would want, he said that justice is more than casebook law, it’s about how the laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives: “I view that quality of empathy … as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”
Obama’s hard-core opponents, who are desperate to see the skywalking young president stumble, immediately seized on that as evidence he wanted to put a soft-hearted and soft-headed liberal on the court.
In introducing his nominee at the White House, the president was quick to address that point. After a rigorous intellect and mastery of the law Obama said his second most important criterion in a judge is “a recognition of the limits of the judicial role, an understanding that a judge’s job is to interpret, not make, law; to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda …”
But the Republican senators most likely to filibuster her were already out and about with their talking points. Typical was Sen. John Cornyn of Texas: “She must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings and preferences.”
Sotomayor was ready with a talking point of her own, a quote from her 1997 hearing on her appointment to the appeals court: “I don’t believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.”
That doesn’t sound touchy-feely at all. Let’s get her confirmation hearings started.