“Obama Selects Sotomayor for Court” [Updates]

UPDATE: “Judge Sonia Sotomayor says she is “humbled” to be President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.”

UPDATE: A portion of President Obama’s remarks:

MORE UPDATES & REMARKS: WaPo coverage of Obama’s and Sotomayor’s remarks.

A small, but amusing highlight for me: Did you notice, during the live coverage, that V.P. Joe Biden was constantly whispering in Sonia Sotomayor’s ear? The look of disgust on Obama’s face was priceless. He was furious. Can Biden ever shut up? Rhetorical question.

Latest photo from the New York Times.

(1 minute ago): “President Obama has chosen Judge Sonia Sotomayor of a Federal Court of Appeals based in New York as his nominee for the Supreme Court, officials said on Tuesday.” NYT

President Obama has decided to nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice, officials said Tuesday.

Judge Sotomayor will be the nation’s first Hispanic judge.

Here’s her bio from the NYT — and a discussion of the talking points against her that Fox News is relentlessly covering:

Judge Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9 years old and she was raised by her mother, who worked six-day weeks to earn enough money to send her and a brother to Catholic school. She got into Princeton University, where she once said she felt like “a visitor landing in an alien country,” but graduated summa cum laude.

After Yale Law School, where she was editor of the Yale Law Journal, she worked for Robert M. Morgenthau in the district attorney’s office in New York and later was in private practice. The first President Bush nominated her in 1991 to the federal district court on the recommendation of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, and she was confirmed a year later. President Bill Clinton decided to elevate her to the appeals court in 1997 and she was confirmed a year later.

Judge Sotomayor has said her ethnicity and gender are important factors in serving on the bench, a point that could generate debate. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2002 lecture.

She also once said at a conference that a “court of appeals is where policy is made,” a statement that has drawn criticism from conservatives who saw it as a sign of judicial activism. Judge Sotomayor seemed to understand at the time that she was making a controversial statement, adding that “I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law.”

Conservatives quickly pointed to such statements after word of her selection on Tuesday.

“Judge Sotomayor is a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, an activist group. “She thinks that judges should dictate policy and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”

White House officials concluded that such statements, while perhaps providing fodder for opponents, would not be problematic enough to hinder her confirmation. Some officials have said in recent days that they relish the prospect of Republicans standing up against a Hispanic woman with her life story because it would only damage the G.O.P. in a key voting bloc.

Indeed, in nominating the first Hispanic justice, Mr. Obama may appeal to a large and growing constituency whose party loyalty is still very much in play. Hispanic groups have expressed excitement about the idea of one of their own serving on the high court. (Some scholars argue whether Benjamin Cardozo was really the first Hispanic justice, but with his Portuguese-Jewish background, he never identified himself as a Hispanic.)

On the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor has not been involved in many hotly disputed decisions, but one that she participated in is before the Supreme Court right now. As part of a panel, she voted to uphold New Haven’s decision to throw out a set of fire department promotion tests because no minority candidates made the top of the list. White firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion are appealing that ruling.

As a district judge, she briefly earned fame in 1995 by ending a Major League Baseball strike, ruling in favor of players and against the owners, who she said were trying to subvert the labor system..