Posted by
Steve on Monday, July 13, 2009 2:33:11 PM
Judge Sonia Sotomayor started her confirmation hearings this morning. Senator Leahy started things off with a disjointed discourse designed to blunt any Republican opposition to her nomination. What his ramblings did was open more questions as to how he could justify his comments. There had been no evidence put forward, to date, that would back up anything that he said. Senator Orrin Hatch referenced Judge Sotomayor’s rise from relative poverty to the cusp of the Supreme Court of the land. There are so many of those rise from poverty stories, it is a wonder that anyone would think it unusual in America. In a socialist country, the rise would be unusual, but in America things like that happen every day.
Since I started taking notice of Supreme Court nominations, Judge Sotomayor has to be the least qualified to sit on the bench that reached the hearing stage. There were some that were nominated that washed out prior to getting hearings and they do not count. Judge Sotomayor disqualified herself from the bench when she made the racist or sexist comment (or both) that a Latina woman would be a better judge than a white male. Nobody that was racist or a sexist with comments like that has made it to the hearing stage since probably the early 1900’s. Back then, there were Supreme Court Justices that belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Today, finding someone with views like that is unusual. You would have to hunt pretty hard to find someone with racist or sexist views like that. Unfortunately, they do not seem to be uncommon in the Obama administration.
Judge Sotomayor will almost surely be confirmed by the Senate. The Republicans have said that they will not filibuster the nomination. For the Republicans to filibuster a Supreme Court nomination is wrong, even with one as bad as this is. The trick will be to get Judge Sotomayor to disqualify herself in the confirmation hearings. That will be nearly impossible as she has undoubtedly been told what to say by Democrats. The Democrats hold 60 votes in the Senate, so stopping her nomination is almost impossible. The best the Republicans can hope to do with this nomination is to prepare the public for the next bad nominee by Obama.
The Democrats have let the cat out of the bag on their plan of attack for the nomination process. The Republicans plan to bring in Frank Ricci, the winning firefighter in the suit that she thought was unimportant. The Democrats plan to destroy Frank Ricci instead of hearing what he has to say. That is typical for the Democrats. They never listen to facts; they just plan to attack the truth instead of listening. That way they make people not want to confront them. It is a shame that they have to stoop to this kind of tactic whenever they know they are on the losing side of an argument. They should be willing to accept that they cannot win all arguments.
The Democrats are trying to portray Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a strict constructionist on Constitutional issues. For them to make that claim is laughable. Just take the Ricci case as an example. It is an easy case to decide and she got it wrong. She has had 60% of her cases overturned that were brought to the Supreme Court. That is a higher rate than almost any other appellate judge in the country. It at least puts her in the lower half of the appellate judges. If her rate were 40% overturned, it would be a much better case that she tries to follow the law as written. The best case would be if her rate were close to 0%. Then the claim would be supported by facts. Right now, their claim is extremely weak.
We will be bombarded with Senators trying to impress the TV cameras this week. We will get little information about Sonia Sotomayor, except for what the Democrats what us to hear. That is backwards from what should be happening. We should learn a lot about the nominee and hear little about the Senators. It is a shame that we have actors in these positions, instead of real Senators. Whatever happened to the true statesmen like Daniel Webster and Thomas Jefferson? We are stuck with Barbara Boxer. That is a poor trade. I guess you get what you deserve. We have been working towards the Barbara Boxers of the world for many years. We have tried to marginalize the Daniel Webster’s and Thomas Jefferson’s.