The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, on its own, doesn’t excite the progressive in me. The Supreme Court hasn’t been an agent of social progress in decades, and in most situations, it probably shouldn’t be. Sotomayor is competent and mainstream.
What gets me riled up is the tactics of the regressive Right. Reasonable people can have good-faith disagreements on issues such as affirmative action. However, painting Sotomayor as some Latina supremacist is absurd. Much has been made of the “wise Latina” comment. I’ve read the transcript of the whole speech, and it’s the opposite of racist. More importantly, Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has reviewed her cases related to race:
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.
All evidence points to a sober and conscientious application of the law, not an agenda to advance Latinas at any cost.
Some of Sotomayor’s critics, on the other hand, have a history of cheering and justifying White supremacy. Senator Jeff Sessions of the Judiciary Committee was himself rejected by it for a seat on the U.S. District Court in Alabama because of racist remarks. He said that he liked the KKK until he found out that some of them smoked pot. Pat Buchanan made an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show and unabashedly claimed that White men deserved to dominate U.S. politics because of their achievements. No one should be surprised, given Pat’s role as an architect of the “Southern strategy” and his other disgusting comments on race. And then we have the wit and wisdom of Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Have they no shame?
