Where Do You Stand on the Sotomayor Nomination? [Update]
By Bronwyn's Harbor on July 13, 2009 at 9:00 AM in Current Affairs
C-Span will begin its coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor at 10:00 a.m. ET Monday. Cable news channels will also provide extensive coverage.
Where do each of you stand on the Sotomayor nomination? Has she received more scrutiny because she’s female? Do you think that, like most pundits, she will have no problem being confirmed? [Note: The NYT's Caucus blog is asking its readers: "What Would You Ask Judge Sotomayor?"] Or is this a “nerd superbowl,” as Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s legal expert, just dubbed it?
Since her May 2009 nomination, No Quarter has published numerous articles on Judge Sotomayor, from Larry Johnson’s “Down With Sotomayor, Most Evil Spic Ever” (that’s a tongue-in-cheek title) to Amy Siskind’s “Get ready for the Sotomayor misogyny-fest.” We’ll revisit a few more of those stories below. First, here’s the latest on preparations for the hearings, via The Daily Beast blog’s “Cheat Sheet” and NYT:
Sotomayor Practicing for Senate Battle
Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings begin Monday, and the Supreme Court nominee has been rehearsing for over a week with Obama administration lawyers to prepare for senators’ hard-hitting questions. Republicans will target her “wise Latina” comment, linking it to President Obama’s earlier comment that it’s important for a judge to have empathy.“Empathy is great, perhaps, if you’re the beneficiary of it,” Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a Senate speech last week. Republicans say they will press Sotomayor on her 10 years as a board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, when Sessions said she took “extreme positions,” as well as her decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the firefighter discrimination case.
Abortion will most likely not be an issue, since she won’t tip the court’s balance, though if senators press her on hot-button issues she might have to rule on as a justice, Sotomayor will most likely say she can’t comment. (Read it at the New York Times.)
Sunday night, C-Span aired a series of interviews of “friends, colleagues and former classmates” of Judge Sotomayor. Fox News aired a Sunday night special, “Judging Sotomayor” (with a Web page full of background stories).
UPDATE from WaPo: On Sunday, The Washington Post published a fascinating background story on Judge Sotomayor:
Within weeks of arriving in New Haven as a law student in the fall of 1976, Sonia Sotomayor fell in with a few first-year classmates whose ascent to Yale Law School was as improbable as her own: a half-Mohawk from Chicago’s South Side who had graduated from high school while sleeping on his social worker’s back porch; a Chicano from New Mexico whose parents had driven him to nice neighborhoods to see what big houses looked like; a black kid from Washington who had made it into the Air Force; a Puerto Rican high school dropout from East Harlem who had been sent to a halfway house for setting his girlfriend’s car on fire.
For three years, this band of brilliant misfits in the preppy Ivy League would be Sotomayor’s closest friends, her apartment their hub to cook elaborate dinners and be, as one of them recalls, “our own little support group.” But they would not be her only world at Yale.
When she got to the Connecticut campus, Sotomayor placed a call to the university’s general counsel, a first-generation Puerto Rican who had scaled academic and governmental heights. José Cabranes had been told by one of Sotomayor’s undergraduate professors to keep an eye out for a talented young woman whose parents had, like him, come from Puerto Rico. He hired her as an intern, asked her to help research a book and opened doors rarely cracked for Yale law students, introducing her to visiting dignitaries and inviting her to small dinners at his fine Colonial home.
By the time she was 22, just married and getting her first taste of the law, Sotomayor already had a hallmark of the woman President Obama has now chosen to join the Supreme Court: She was a striking mixture of uneasy outsider and consummate insider. … Read all of the WaPo article.
Here are but a few highlights from some of the many articles at No Quarter over the past few months:
“SCOTUS and Ricci,” by LisaB, June 30, 2009:
[...] I’ve heard many arguments about the test used with some arguing that “stereotype threat” was part of the problem as well as the possibility that majority AA schools – because of historic discrimination – are not capable of preparing students for such tests and so AA test-takers are disadvantaged. Some also argue that one of the plaintiffs clearly had an advantage because he could take time off to study for the exam. That same plaintiff also paid a friend to read manuals into a recording because the firefighter has dyslexia.
I think that had that firefighter who paid a friend to read for him been in wonderful schools, he might have more strategies for dealing with dyslexia than resorting to paying someone to create audiobooks. That guy also really really wanted the promotion, so he took the time off (from a second job) to prepare. As for the other arguments of “stereotype threat” and sub-par majority AA schools, I’d like more details on how either is so debilitating that men brave enough to fight fires would not have a way to deal with either.
Given these are real people, exactly what were the problems? Was the test given in a “whites only” space? Were all the proctors white? Did the test use only “white” English (and wouldn’t use of Ebonics be offensive anyway?), were the AA firefighters given less time to study or less time to complete the test? [...]
Wouldn’t it be really interesting to know what the AA firefighters who took the test think about it? … (Read the rest of LisaB’s many questions and observations.)
“Getting Smart on Sotomayor,” by Larry Johnson, June 1, 2009:
There is so much ill-informed, emotional garbage floating around the internet that I thought a factual pause might be appropriate. Here’s a new rule–unless you have actually read the legal opinions written by Judge Sotomayor and examined the original decision in the underlying cases you are not qualified to have an opinion about her. You do have the right to be stupid and ignorant, but if you have not actually read the legal reasoning in the disputed cases then you are simply operating on hearsay. Third hand hearsay at best. [...]
“Rat-eating felon G. Gordon Liddy hopes Sotomayor doesn’t have her period during important decisions,” by Uppity Woman, May 31, 2009:
No kidding. You can’t make this shit up. This animal actually said that. I just cannot believe it. I mean I really can’t believe it. I’m so pissed off I had to post this on my “day off!”.
Toss another knuckle-dragging sack of crap into the pile that guarantees the Republican Party will never recover. Imagine being married to something like this and not killing it in its sleep?
And don’t forget to buy some gold from this neanderthal, you hear? [...]
“Why Can’t Obama Be Like Sotomayor?,” by Larry Johnson, May 30, 2009:
Anyone else besides me bothered by the transparency in the information being released about Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s academic record compared to the wall of silence protecting Barack Obama? For example, we know that Judge Sotomayor finished second in her class at Princeton. She graduated Summa Cum Laude. How about Barack’s undergraduate record at Columbia?
Crickets. Nothing. We know he completed his undergraduate studies but did he receive academic honors? Did he graduate cum laude? Grade point average? Phi Beta Kappa? Barack and his campaign stonewall and we simply do not know. Now why is that? He has been duly elected, so this is not a challenge to his Presidency, but why would the “smartest” guy to ever serve in the White House obfuscate when it comes to his own academic marks?
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