Open Thread: Eight Senators, Four Hours to Go For Sotomayor
By Bronwyn's Harbor on July 15, 2009 at 9:58 AM in Current Affairs
You’re probably chortling that President Barack Obama was booed at last night’s All-Star Game as he threw out the first ceremonial pitch (like a “sissy,” some are saying). But it is notable that the long-winded gaggle in the Senate Judiciary Committee (surprise, surprise) didn’t get through its membership yesterday. There are eight senators to go, including the recently demoted Arlen Specter and newbie Al Franken. How’s it going, in YOUR estimation?
We’ll add more commentary shortly. In the meantime, even Yahoo Sports weighed in on the President’s pitch:
Where did it land? Was it a strike or wasn’t it? Why didn’t the network choose a better camera to shoot from? Those were the questions that viewers of baseball’s All-Star Game were asking themselves at home after Fox elected to show President Barack Obama’s ceremonial first pitch at the 80th All-Star Game from a tight angle.
Ruling as a part-time umpire who had a good view from the pressbox at Busch Stadium, Obama’s pitch was a no-doubt-about-it ball, even factoring in an expanded strike zone for the Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s southpaw delivery was a little short of the plate, but Cardinals star Albert Pujols(notes) was able to save it by quickly scooping it up. …
Adds the Scared Monkeys blog in “Hmm … President Obama Gets Booed at MLB All Star Game in St Louis … And Throws Lame Pitch“:
What was up with FOX Sports not showing the full pitch? Were they told by Barry’s handlers not to just in case he bounced the ball to home plate because it would have been spread like wildfire on the internet?
One thing is for certain, the Obama bloom is off the rose and people are starting to voice their displeasure with Obama’s policies and the economy.
And here’s the video in which you can hear the booing along with the cheers and applause:
Hey, they all get booed, best I recall. Dubya and Bill Clinton too. But it does seem that the dissents to the once-perfect president are getting louder around the country.
Getting back to Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, you can find a wide range of opinions on her responses yesterday. I personally felt queasy as she constantly downplayed what she’d said since it is intellectually dishonest not to recognize that we all have our own sets of experiences and prejudices that we inevitably bring to every situation. The key, it’s always seemed to me, is to factor in those personal views and attitudes when one is fashioning as objective opinion as is possible. In her defense, it is difficult to describe one’s own experiences as influential in one’s decisions when the confirmation hearing turns into a “Gotcha” game.
Here are some snippets of views across the spectrum about yesterday’s testimony:
Via the Volokh Conspiracy blog, from a Federalist Society Online Debate yesterday, Mike Siedman wrote:
… I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate. …
Craig Crawford, writing for CQ Politics, writes that the Democrats should be the ones smiling about yesterday’s hearing. (You’ll recall that Crawford was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy and was critical of Obama’s qualifications.)
Does the Republican senator think it is amusing that he and his party’s condescending tone toward the Hispanic woman was costing them ethnic votes with each passing hour of Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing?
It is not that the Republican inquiries were out of bounds in legal terms. But a confirmation hearing like this is a political forum.
Even if they vote for her, the fallout for Republicans could reach well beyond Hispanic voters. They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.
In contrast, Lawrence Tribe, the professor of law at Harvard who has argued many cases before the Supreme Court, notes that the politicization of the hearings prevents us from getting a true picture of what kind of Supreme Court Justice that Judge Sotomayor would make:
Sadly, the Sotomayor hearings thus far have served to confirm my prediction that these rituals are structured to reveal as little as possible about the kind of justice a nominee will make. Sonia Sotomayor’s impressive academic record and extraordinary legal and judicial career already established her ample qualifications to serve. Her precise handling of the questions, to the degree they were substantive, has largely confirmed that conclusion.
Of greater interest to some has been the way Sotomayor would handle questions about the candor she displayed in speeches addressing the way a judge’s personal experience shapes the way that judge will rule in difficult cases. That candor, to me, is part of what commends her as a jurist. But it is also part of what the conventional wisdom tells a nominee to deny. …
by Ronald Scott
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