The soon to be anointed Justice Sotomeyor performed pretty much as I expected her to during the Senate conformation hearings. She doesn’t really frighten me so much as the next appointee sticks into a job for life. After all, replacing a sexist constitution hating member of the Supreme Court with another will not make all that much difference. The next one though? The impostor in chief just might get a Second Amendment ruling of the people kind… In any case Mike Rosen summed up the hearings pretty well. Read on;
Predictably, the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor were mostly for show.
The senators played their roles, just as Sotomayor played hers. Democrats sang her praises and lobbed her softballs. Republicans homed in on her controversial decisions, which she deftly parried with contradictory assertions, evasions, rationalizations, circumlocutions and lateral arabesques.
When pressed to explain how she might rule on future cases, she liberally invoked the “Ginsburg rule,” institutionalized in 1993 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to answer hypothetical questions during her confirmation hearing. (How do they get away with that? If you were interviewing someone for a job, wouldn’t you want to know how they’d deal with future contingencies?)
Alas, in politics, this is the way the game is played. Nominees hold their cards close to the vest. Candor takes a back seat to tap dancing, carefully crafted ambiguity, and declarations of motherhood and apple pie. Even Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts pulled their punches as nominees. The last Supreme Court candidate to say what he really believed — and eloquently, at that — was Robert Bork. He wasn’t confirmed.
As was expected, conservatives were unsatisfied with many of Sotomayor’s answers. But the mixed reviews on the left were more interesting. Pragmatists within the liberal establishment, rooting for Sotomayor, took her coy answers at face value and declared her to be respectably moderate. E.J. Dionne asserted that “she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made.” NPR’s oh-so-liberal judicial “reporter” Nina Totenberg hilariously opined on the “Charlie Rose” show that Sotomayor may be even more conservative on some issues than Justice Anthony Scalia!
Maureen Dowd lamented Sotomayor’s retreat from her earlier preening about the superiority of “a wise Latina woman” but explained why it was necessary. “As any clever job applicant knows,” admitted Dowd, “you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions — even though that’s why the president wants her.”
On the far left, political pragmatism gave way to doctrinaire ideological grandstanding. This was their moment to proudly proclaim their judicio-political creed. Dahlia Lithwick told MSNBC she was upset that Sotomayor and the Democrats “bought into [Chief Justice Roberts‘] notion that judges call balls and strikes” rather than ruling on their personal opinions.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives — and a socialist, one-world, Kumbaya utopian of the first order — urged Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to “make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.” If they had any backbone, Lerner said, they should declare: “We intend to vote for you, Judge Sotomayor. But we hope that you overcome this notion that you’ve been putting forward that your task on the Supreme Court is simply to enforce the law . . . we hopePresident Obama picked someone who was not just a passive ratifier of precedent, but a creative thinker who could look at the needs of American society today and help shape laws that fit these new realities.”
Lerner then rejected the “false notion that law is somehow impartial” and condemned the “rich white men” who made those laws and the “corporate power” they serve. Whew, what a mouthful!
Liberals needn’t worry. Sotomayor will be reliably “progressive,” if not the left-wing revolutionary Lerner hoped for. To believe otherwise, you’d have to imagine that theObama team got suckered by a closet conservative. No way. Only Republican presidents make mistakes like that. We’ll see soon enough when she takes her seat and starts casting votes and writing opinions. I’m betting Sotomayor will beRuth Bader Ginsburg with a Latino flavor.
Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
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