Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sotomayor critics' knees are jerking
Dan Radmacher
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From the RoundTable blog
I don't know yet what I think of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, not having had the time to digest the 380 opinions she authored as a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals or assess much beyond the bullet points of what certainly appears to be an impressive résumé: summa cum laude graduate from Princeton University, editor of the Yale Law Review and graduate of that prestigious law school, a prosecutor in Manhattan, a Columbia Law School lecturer. It certainly doesn't appear to be the résumé of an intellectual lightweight.
Lack of time hasn't, naturally, stopped plenty of Obama's conservative critics from leaping out of their seats to render summary judgment, with many focusing on Sotomayor's gender and ethnicity as nearly prima facie proof of her unfitness to serve.
Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, said, "This is someone who clearly was picked because she's a woman and Hispanic, not because she was the best qualified."
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said, "In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh [Sotomayor's] qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender or political preferences."
The strangest criticism came from National Review Online's Mark Krikorian, who wrote, "Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English. ..." (One wonders if he had similar criticisms for Justice Samuel Alito?)
Lots of critics picked up on a couple of outof-context quotes from Sotomayor that made her sound like a racist and a judicial activist. In one, she said that an appeals court "is where policy is made." In another, she said, "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."
Those are both controversial statements, certainly. The first, though, was an offhand response during a panel discussion to a question from a law student about the differences between clerking at the federal appeals court and the district court. The second was one sentence out of a 4,000-word speech.
Rod Dreher of The Dallas Morning News initially joined the chorus of other conservatives criticizing the remark. Then he took the time to read the entire speech. His conclusion: "Taken in context, the speech was about how the context in which we were raised affects how judges see the world, and that it's unrealistic to pretend otherwise. Yet -- and this is a key point -- she admits that as a jurist, one is obligated to strive for neutrality."
Others have leapt -- rather unwisely, it seems -- at the number of majority opinions Sotomayor has authored that have been overturned by the Supreme Court. Three of the five opinions she wrote that the court reviewed have been overturned. A Washington Times article called that rate of reversal a "potent line of attack raised by opponents."
But Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs pointed out that Sotomayor had written more than 380 majority opinions in her 11 years on the appeals bench. A reversal of only three of those hardly seems damning. Both cases reviewed by the court that Alito authored while he was on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were overturned. That certainly wasn't disqualifying.
The one substantive criticism I've found so far is the odd ruling in the controversial reverse-discrimination case involving white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who sued after a promotional exam they successfully completed was tossed out after the fact because no minorities earned promotions based on the results.
Despite the weighty constitutional issues involved, and the 1,800-pages of briefs and appendixes submitted by both sides, Sotomayor and the two other judges on the panel that heard the case affirmed a lower court ruling against the plaintiffs with a one-paragraph, unpublished summary order.
The Supreme Court will rule shortly on that case, and many observers expect the panel's order to be overturned.
During her confirmation hearings, Sotomayor should be asked about the strange handling of the case.
In the meantime, some of her detractors (rather, Obama's detractors -- can there be any doubt that these people would be hyperventilating about anyone Obama nominated?), should attempt to calm their jerking knees and examine Sotomayor's actual record before deciding whether to support or oppose her.
That's my plan, anyway.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
