President Barack Obama explains his choice of Sotomayer.
Law professors Jack Balkin (Yale) and Michael Dorf (Cornell) explain why they think Obama picked Sotomayor. Balkin focuses on the politics, Dorf on why her mastery of the technical side of law is important.
Stuart Taylor of the National Journal discusses Sotomayor’s connection to Ricci v. DeStafano, the affirmative action/reverse discrimination case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has two posts, one on identity politics and Sotomayer, another on the Ricci case. Slate’s Emily Bazelon also discusses Sotomayor’s conduct in Ricci. We’ll be hearing more about this, especially after the court hands down its decision.
An editorial in today’s Washington Post tempered praise with a note that her belief that as a Latina woman she’s wiser than a white man could call her objectivity into question.
The Politico reports that Rush Limbaugh, who employs the rhetorical subtlety of a Brownshirt howling outside a synagogue, called Sotomayor a “reverse racist,” an opinion that I think misses the mark. Sotomayer’s belief that her gender, ethnicity (ethnicity differs from race), and life experiences make her wiser than white men, at least in some unspecified circumstances, is arrogance, but it’s not proof that she’s a bigot.
The Boston Globe reports that Sotomayor would become the sixth Catholic justice. The other Catholic members of the court are Chief Justice Roberts, and justices Thomas, Alito, Scalia, and Kennedy. All but Kennedy are conservatives. One of the most liberal justices in the court’s history was William Brennan, a Catholic who voted with the majority in both Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, so being Catholic does not automatically mean a justice is a reactionary — but the recent history of Catholic justices is not encouraging to those of us with a liberal point if view. If Sotomayor is pro-life, Roe v. Wade could be in grave danger.
Article VI of the Constitution wisely forbids a religious qualification for office. Nevertheless, religion is one of the most important determinants of a person’s approach to life, so the impact — if any — of her Catholicism on her judicial philosophy is of interest whether or not the subject is discussed openly. A belief in the supernatural, widespread though it is, exists uneasily at best with a person’s respect for fact and ability to reason logically. At this point, Sotomayor seems to be a Catholic in name only, and one supposes that President Obama would not have appointed her had he detected right-to-life leanings — but people change, and other justices have surprised and confounded Presidents, so wondering whether her Catholicism endangers Roe v. Wade is reasonable.
Will she be confirmed? I think so. Will she be roughed-up or lose the glow in her halo during the confirmation process? We’ll find out.
Finally, a note on an error, now corrected, in yesterday’s post. I used the term “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party”. The former is a sophmoric Republican taunt. The latter is the correct name of the organization. The error certainly wasn’t intentional, but I did make it, which is why I review and clean-up my posts a few hours after uploading them.