“The right thing for the Republicans to do would be to take the high-ground and embrace the new political atmosphere.” – This obviously won’t happen.

“he has always championed merit, fairness and common-sense” – acquiescence, compromise, centrism, then.

“Sotomayor appears to put reason and pragmatism ahead of culture-war politics” – thinks getting everyone to agree, even scum like the GOP, is more important than being right.

Loving the right-whingers’ reaction. They’re just getting more angry and frustrated as their world slips away and they become more irrelevant and marginal by the day.

Let us fucking well gloat at Republicans. Who the fuck would support them now?

Why don’t they fucking pray to their god that he puts them back in power? Because he doesn’t fucking exist.

Am I missing something or is there not much of a fight to be had here? She’s a well-qualified nominee from a Democratic President going before a Democratic Congress with a reasonable majority – I know that the Republicans are curiously competent at getting their way despite being completely crazy but aside the shit-storm they’re already causing in the media, what can they actually do? Short of a complete vetting failure, it seems like she’s in to me.

If Democrats give in Republican whining on this, they might as well go home – any other candidate will be treated exactly the same. The fight was back in November, they won.

Democrats are wimps, though. They controlled both houses in 2006 onwards but refused to even consider holding Bush and Cheney to account over Iraq. Obama is a skilled politician but he hasn’t got a great deal of political courage either.

I know that the Republicans are curiously competent at getting their way despite being completely crazy but aside the shit-storm they’re already causing in the media, what can they actually do? ~ Alex

I may be wrong on my technicals here, but…

The GOP could try to filibuster her, but I think such a candidate would get a filibuster-proof vote. Of course the Republicans know they wont stop the nomination, but the fight is more valuable to them.

I think Obama is playing it well. He’s selected a perfectly qualified and reasonable nominee. The American people are wary of Republican partisan bullshit. They’re tired of the same old polarising shit. Obama’s saying: “look, they’re being children again”.

Also, if the GOP are to win in four years, they *have* to pull back the Latino vote. You see where I’m going here?

Play the long game…

Rayyan: acquiescence, compromise, centrism, then.

He was always centrist from day one! What are you accusing him of?

Aaron: The GOP needs a Supreme Court fight to energise and unite its base — not to mention invigorate its fund-raising efforts.

Just added a video that highlights some of the Republican attacks on Sotomayor. These guys are nutbags. Especially since they did the exact same thing in the past:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/27/gop-stressed-gonzales-his_n_208175.html

I’m accusing him of selling himself as progressive full stop, rather than simply more progressive than the last lot (hardly a tall order), on the campaign trail – only to turn around and disappoint many of his supporters with his bizarrely conservative (in a not-pushing-the-boat-out meaning of the word) choices. To the likes of Geithner and Summers, under whose watch the financial crisis unfolded, he tasks with cleaning up the mess. Everyone could see that was a bad idea, although perhaps it’s a little too early to see if the second bailout will work. Eliot Spitzer’s interviews with Rachel Maddows give a good indication of just how wrong Obama’s economic recovery plans have been so far.

And his lack of willingness to substantially change foreign policy and national security policy has already been well documented by the likes of Maddow and Glenn Greenwald.

What I’m saying is, the GOP are pathetically shrivelled; the Democrats control both chambers of Congress, and are close to a supermajority in the Senate; Obama has a huge personal mandate and tons of political capital: so why is he so unwilling to just push the boat out? Sotomayor just screams “playing it safe in case I upset all the rich white folks”. Yes, the GOP will still attempt to block her: but they are powerless. Why not do what he promised he would do on the campaign trail and act like a progressive president?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uuWVHT1WUY

Heh, thanks for the video, Sunny.

Sunny

Republican attacks on Sotomayor.

Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Please remind me which congressional districts or states they represent. Those three are representative of a marginal political base, not representative of the GOP as a whole. I suspect that if I trawled for 60 seconds or so I could find some idiotic statements from Michael Moore. What does it prove?

On my blog I made the case for the GOP not challenging Sotomayor, one of the reasons being that her compelling personal history is the type of story that the GOP should be celebrating. But having said that, she is a woman who believes a latina is more qualified than a white man, that the courts are where policy is made and that white firefighters shouldn’t be allowed promotion because no black firefighters passed a promotion exam. Those values are antithetical to conservatism and should rightly be challenged.

If being an incumbent allows Obama to nominate a justice unchallenged as the direction of this post suggests, how would you justify the attacks on Bork, Thomas and Alito? I don’t think Sotomayor will be filibustered, but Obama is on dodgy ground if he objects to one as he is the only President in American history to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee during his career.

Are any Senate Republicans going to vote for her, like?

It would be of interest to see if any of them do. To my mind she seems a fairly uncontroversial pick from a cautious & conservative president who chooses his battles well. Most of us on the left were never part of his personality cult & didn’t expect the world to be handed to us on a plate on day 1, we expected slow & incremental improvements & long-standing change (often of the social & cultural kind that would have happened under McCain anyway, but to which Obama was viewed as a closer friend).

Yes- I have not retracted my support for Obama as he has done nothing to alienate me. I’d like further pushing towards marriage equality, drugs sanity & an evidence-based approach to scientific shite, but I realise I’m not a centrist in American terms & we are only one arm of the Obama coalition which includes most independents & moderates, which is related to a crucial fact, that even if I began to be seriously enraged at Obama I’d still prefer him to any viable opposition. Who is emerging to provide sound opposition from the GOP? I do not observe anything worthy of my support.

I do hope the Republicans revive along free-market, libertarian lines & ditch shite like creationism. All governments need to be opposed & we in this country know better than most the danger of overstretch coming from safely entrenched governments without an opposition! But for the time being I support a Democrat ascendancy until the GOP sorts itself out.

I would probably register as an independent & vote Democrat most of the time but support independent & Republican candidates if they had particular merits of their own or if, as I envisage happening around 2014, the Dems start going too far & that.

Sotomayor isn’t an activist judge. She’s a champion of judicial process. To the polarised partisan her judgements might appear ambiguous (and so could be “shaped” to fit any desired narrative), but this is because they’re nuanced. A judge shouldn’t seek to push an agenda.

I think Sotomayor looks a good pick (and lets be honest, I doubt that most of us had really heard much about her before this week, we’re not US legal experts), but there are a couple of things she has said that, quite legitimately, would cause concern for conservatives – in both the legal and political sense.

The first one was this:

“All of the legal defense funds out there, they’re looking for people with Court of Appeals experience. Because it is — Court of Appeals is where policy is made,” she said.

Which is virtually the definition of judicial activism – though she owed back from that position pretty quickly.

The second was this:

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.

Which is, what, racist and sexist isn’t it?

So there we are. Republicans probably won’t seek to block her appointment, both because they lack the numbers for a filibuster, and because seeking to block judicial appointments has always been a Democrat thing, and not a Republican thing. Look at the list of Justices: the liberal judges (O’Connor, Kennedy, Stevens, Souter and Breyer) were all virtually unopposed in confirmation. The conservatvies (apart from Scalia) Thomas, Roberts and Alito were all more or less heavily opposed by the Democrats in the Senate.

I don’t see there’ll be much of a fight here. Republicans looking at a presidential nomination run in 2012 will oppose her, Republicans with large Latino populations will support her, moderate Republicans will support her. Close to 100% of Democrats in the Senate will support her, and I reckon she’ll get 10-15 Republican Senators onside too. Filibustering would damage the GOP if it were even possible to persuade enough Republican Senators to do it, which it won’t be. Only thing that can stop her will be if the Obama team has not vetted well and there’s a deep dark secret from her past, which seems unlikely.

Which is, what, racist and sexist isn’t it?

Oh dear, why do people look at comments without their context?

Oh dear, why do people look at comments without their context?

ABSOLUTELY

This is really bothering me. Her statements were with regard to avoiding making her race and gender an issue. Just a another sentence makes the “reverse racism” charge a joke. Even the MSM are misrepresenting her (CNN).

That Liberal press, huh?

Full context:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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.

So, whether or not it’s because of her inherent physiological and cultural differences, a Latina woman is wiser than a white man. I’m sorry, but I don’t see that the context of the statement changes it in any way. You might agree with it – that being a woman and/or being from a Hispanic background might genuinely give you greater wisdom – but it is, on its face, racist and sexist – in that it elevates a subset of people purely and solely on the grounds of their race and sex. If you can interpret the remark in another way Sunny, please do so. Feel free to use lots of context.

And as for her comments being made to avoid making her race and gender an issue – they were made in a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation,” which would seem to me to be precisely about making her race an issue – and no bad thing at that. I’m not arguing against wide ethnic diversity in the judiciary, only saying that in this instance, what Sotomayor said was a bit off.