Obama’s Supreme challenge to the GOP

What happened

President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court this week, setting the stage to replace retiring Justice David Souter with the nation’s first Hispanic justice. Born to Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx, N.Y., Sotomayor, 53, was raised in a public housing project, was valedictorian of her Catholic high school, graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, and went on to Yale Law School. After she served as a prosecutor and corporate litigator, President George H.W. Bush named Sotomayor to the federal district court in New York in 1992. Six years later she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Obama, who had previously said that he sought a nominee with “empathy,” said Sotomayor possessed “not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life’s journey.”

Of the four finalists for the nomination, Sotomayor was Obama’s boldest choice, representing a dare to Republicans to mount an attack on a Hispanic woman. Conservative activists reacted with outrage to the selection, pointing to several hot-button comments that they say prove Sotomayor is a “judicial activist” with a liberal agenda. In a 2001 speech, for example, Sotomayor said, “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.” Senate Republicans, though, took a circumspect tone about the nomination, apparently out of fear of further alienating constituencies who voted strongly Democratic in 2008. “I’m going to wait, see what the hearings and judiciary committees reveal,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

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What the editorials said

Sotomayor would bring a “fresh perspective” to the court, said The Washington Post. But her record still deserves scrutiny, including her controversial ruling in a reverse discrimination case in New Haven, Conn. When no black firefighter passed a written test for promotion there, whites who had passed it were also denied promotion. Sotomayor “rubber-stamped” a lower court ruling against a white firefighter who had claimed discrimination. She should “discuss her thinking” on that, but altogether we see “much to admire” in Sotomayor’s achievements.

Unfortunately, those achievements have also led to Sotomayor’s view of the law as “a voyage of personal identity,” said The Wall Street Journal. Her comment about the superiority of a Latina woman’s judgment reveals a dangerous belief that “the law isn’t what the Constitution says, but whatever the judge in the ‘richness’ of her experience” decides it should be.

What the columnists said

As a conservative who once worked for Sotomayor, said law professor Gerard N. Magliocca in The New York Times, I can attest to her “intellectual rigor and fairness,” her “measured temperament,” and broad, real-world experience. How many judges “have strapped on a bulletproof vest” to raid a warehouse holding counterfeit goods? How many judges “have faced a labor decision as intense” as her 1995 ruling ending the Major League Baseball strike? Sotomayor is a pragmatist with “a distrust of abstraction.’’

No, she’s a “radical,” said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. In fact, no recent nominee has shown “less genuine interest in the traditional craft of judging.” With this nomination, Obama has abandoned “the old-fashioned virtue of objectivity” in favor of “judging based on feelings.” He wants Sotomayor to apply her “personal sympathies and prejudices” on the bench, “eviscerating the constitutional function of the Supreme Court, as empathy trumps impartiality.”

Here comes the right-wing hysteria, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate

.com. Conservatives trumpeted Justice Samuel Alito’s “blue-collar upbringing” and Justice Clarence Thomas’ childhood poverty during their confirmation hearings. So why is Sotomayor’s triumph over adversity suddenly a negative? As for her comments that a female Latina judge would see the world differently than a privileged white male like Chief Justice John Roberts, “that point is irrefutable.”

What next?

With at least 59 Democratic votes in the Senate, Democrats hope Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings will go smoothly, allowing her to join the court for its fall term. Meanwhile, Republican leaders this week met with strategists to plot their response. “Republicans are in a very awkward position,” said Robert de Posada, a GOP strategist. Attacks on the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee “could be the last straw when it comes to the party’s ability to reach the Hispanic community.”