Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Sotomayor to the Supreme Court

President Obama is set to announce Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor has a very compelling personal history - Her parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, and despite living in a housing project, her father dying while she was a teenager, and her mother raising her and her brother while working as a nurse, she graduated at the top of her class from Princeton and Yale Law. She has worked as a prosecutor, judge and appellate judge.

She is also an extremely liberal jurist and that troubles Republicans (understandably), and they are already threatening a filibuster.

Huge mistake! First off we are no worse off with her than Souter so why engender the ill will. Secondly it makes the Republicans look hypocritical. After all they bitched and moaned about the way the dems held up nominees. Third, they don't have the votes to sustain a filibuster so save the fight for a time when they can win.

That isn't to say they shouldn't trot out every blemish on her record and fight hard to convince other senators to vote against her. Do that - maybe you will get lucky and some red-state dem will have second thoughts.

Ann Althouse agrees -

Here's what I think conservatives should do: Accept that she will be confirmed, but use the occasion to sharpen the definition of conservative judicial values and to argue to the American people that these are the better values.


Gabriel Malor has more over at Ace of Spades -

Quotas and Racism: I've been sitting on this for a while--actually, I've been trying to write some coherent thoughts about it--but now is the time: Sonia Sotomayor embraces quotas, the inherently "better" wisdom of Latina women over white men, and labels state judiciaries as sexist. Seriously now, click that link. Morgen at Verum Serum continued to dig through Sotomayor's past and found a disturbing speech on race and sex which Sotomayor gave in 2001.

I've read the whole thing and it is worse than the excerpts he provides.

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