Sotomayor Confirmed

Senator Al Franken presided over the Senate chamber as Judge Sonya Sotomayor was confirmed as the newest Justice on the United States Supreme Court in a 68 to 31 vote.

Only nine Republican Senators -- Alexander (R-TN), Bond (R-MO), Collins (R-ME), Graham (R-SC), Gregg (R-NH), Lugar (R-IN), Martinez (R-FL), Snowe (R-ME), Voinovich (R-OH) -- joined the the two Independents -- Sanders (I-VT), Lieberman (ID-CT) -- to vote with the Democrats for the confirmation.

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LA Times: Senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court

More Dumb Things Were Said

Hey, Someone Noticed

Atrios:

Craig Crawford:

They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.

Wanker Of The Day

Atrios:

Jeff Sessions

Sessions Treats White Male Nominees Differently Than Female Latina Nominees

Third Branch, C and L:

For Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, white men deserve preferential treatment. Given his stated sympathies for the KKK, this is hardly surprising. But it is worth noting. [...]

Sessions demands preferential treatment for white men. He clearly applies a stricter standard to persons who are not white men. Given his history, this is hardly surprising. But it is also the perfect embodiment of the Republican philosophy.

That's Going To Leave A Mark

BarbinMD:

In a variation of the old admonition that a lawyer should never ask a question if they don't know the answer, today Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) learned that it's not a good idea to use someone to make an argument without making sure that the person being used isn't in the room:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 "wise Latina" speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices."

"My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here," Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’s apparent surprise. "We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts."

And what does Cedarbaum think about Sotomayor's judicial philosophy?

I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no affect on her approach to judging."

Oops. That has to be embarrassing.

Sotomayor, Dems, turn the Republicans' table

P.M. Carpenter:

On the first day of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Republican senators uttered approximately 12,000 words in opening statements. Of these, precisely 11 made sense: "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to get confirmed," said Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's missionary of world-weary wisdom housed always so humbly in cracker-barrel folksiness.

That rhetorical sequestration conveniently stood out as the Republican soundbite to be aired by the media time and again, because, as suggested, those other 11,989 words were an audible blur of banality and base-pandering, proving only that the Beltway GOP had learned not one thing since eight months and nine days ago.

They tried their best to circle the ideological wagons and obfuscate, confuse and terrify the innocent -- as though these cartoonish little figures from Monsters Inc. had any believable terror left in them.

Frankly, it was a bit sad to see such once-mighty demagogues go so flat; but flat they were, beginning at the beginning, with ranking member Jeff Sessions, whose spooky "dangerous crossroads" opening statement sounded like a $5 séance complete with rattling plastic bones, lugubrious organ music and prerecorded apparitional hoots and hollers.

Barbara's Daily Buzz

07/14/2009:

After listening to all the Repuglican grandstanding today during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I am convinced she is absolutely right 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." Sorry to say the Repuglicans are still the Party of just say NO, they still care more about Party Power than what's good for America!

* * *
My grandmother used to say, "vanity thy name is man" and it couldn't be more relevant than it is today -- the Repuglican male ego has been bruised and they have their boxers in a knot because "a Latina woman is wiser" than the whole lot of Repuglican males! Their egos "can't stand the truth" and so they go about tearing her down piece by piece, misrepresentation by misrepresentation. It's business as usual for the Repuglicans, slander the opponent in order to try and appear superior. It'll never happen, won't work, the Repuglicans have become so predictable that it makes them boring white males.

The 10 Dumbest Things Republicans Have Said About the Sotomayor Hearings

A list of the most ridiculous questions, jabs and rants by GOP lawmakers and other conservatives.

AlterNet Staff:

At her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to keep a straight face while Republicans heaped shame upon their party with a flood of ridiculous questions, unjustified jabs and tangential, pointless rants.

From sexist attacks about Sotomayor's "temperament" to a rigorous interrogation about the definition of nunchucks, GOPers came up with a multitude of embarrassing ways to try to hinder the Supreme Court nominee's confirmation.

The craziness and incompetence on display at the hearings has been more than matched by the absurd smears leveled at Sotomayor in the conservative media. The shining lights of conservatism -- such intellectual heavyweights Pat Buchanan, G. Gordan Liddy and Rush Limbaugh -- have outdone themselves with uninformed, offensive rants about the nominee.

AlterNet has compiled the 10 dumbest, most ridiculous statements about Sotomayor to issue from the lips of GOP lawmakers and other conservatives in the past few weeks.

Below The Bottom Of The Barrel

Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court has revealed the ugly side of the Republican Party.

William Rivers Pitt:

Last week, the malady mutated into a whole new thing - Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome - and boy, but it's a doozy. Ranting incoherence, brazen racism and suicidal ideation swept through the ranks of the far right after Judge Sotomayor was nominated to replace Justice Souter on the high court, symptoms that became worse by orders of magnitude as the week wore on. By the weekend, those suffering from Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome had not only struck the bottom of the barrel in their attempts to tear the Sotomayor nomination down, but had plowed right through the wood and burrowed deep into the slime and ooze beneath. [...]

"After a week of escalating race and gender rhetoric from the right over the Sotomayor nomination, it's now looking like some in the Republican Party - those concerned with actually getting elected - have become alarmed by the political damage the more extreme members of their party may be doing and are moving to rein in the vitriol," reported Eric Kleefield of Talking Points Memo on Friday. "It's the starkest example yet of an interesting division within the right, one that has been apparent for some time, but which the Sotomayor nomination has not only crystallized but accelerated: the right-wing bomb-throwers obsessed with ideological purity versus the right-wing pragmatists who want the party to actually win election again some day."

By the end of last weekend, Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome had blown this rift within the GOP wide open. Establishment conservatives are now directly pitted against the vocal ideologues on their right flank and a GOP base that seems to be avidly listening to them. For a party already traumatized by arguments over immigration, two decisive routs in a row at the polls, and an absolute absence of any real leadership, the advent of this newest intra-party bloodbath is the worst possible situation.

Stay tuned.

Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy: The Conservative Stealth Strategy

George Lakoff:

The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack - on President Obama's central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line. [...]

Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.

Let's start with the attack on empathy. Why empathy? Isn't empathy a good thing?

Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others - not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.

Progressives care about others as well as themselves. They have a moral obligation to act on their empathy - a social responsibility in addition to personal responsibility, a responsibility to make the world better by making themselves better. This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them. Protection includes worker, consumer, and environmental protection as well as safety nets and health care. Empowerment includes what is in the president's stimulus plan: infrastructure, education, communication, energy, the availability of credit from banks, a stock market that works. No one can earn anything at all in this country without protection and empowerment by the government. All progressive legislation is made on this basis. [...]

Empathy in this sense is a threat to conservatism, which features individual, not social, responsibility and a strict, punitive form of "justice." It is no surprise that empathy would be a major conservative target in the Sotomayor evaluation.

But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. [...]

Taken together, the attacks on Sotomayor work as attacks on Obama and progressive thought. They are also attacks on "moderate" conservatives, who think with progressives on many issues. [...]

How should Democrats respond?

Democrats should go on offense. They need to rally behind empathy- real empathy, not empathy reframed as emotion and personal feeling. They need to speak regularly about empathy as being the basis of our democracy. They need to point out that empathy leads one to notice real social and systemic causes of our troubles and to notice when and how judicial decisions and legislation can harm the most vulnerable of our countrymen. And finally that empathy is the reason that we have the principles of freedom and fairness - which are necessary components of justice.

Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.

Game On

Coin toss: Heads, Obama wins. Tails, GOP loses.

The Most Dangerous Game

William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t:

Needless to say, it's on.

Before the nomination of Judge Sotomayor, lots of people were expecting President Obama to replace Justice Souter with someone virtually identical to Justice Souter: moderate, even-tempered, contemplative, and above all else, inoffensive to as much of the galaxy of interested interest groups as could be managed. Instead, Mr. Obama nominated someone moderate, even-tempered, contemplative, profoundly experienced, and above all else, guaranteed to hyperactivate a certain segment of those interested interests while putting the Republican Party in an almost inescapable bind. [...]

The Republican right-wing's campaign of resistance settled into a predictable pattern almost immediately after the announcement. While those voicing opposition to Judge Sotomayor claimed to be surprised and disappointed that Obama chose such a "controversial" nominee, the truth is they've been suiting up for weeks to fight whomever finally got the nod. Their attacks were triggered automatically and would have come no matter what; if Mr. Obama had nominated Jesus of Nazareth to replace Justice Souter, the GOP would now be denouncing Him for favoring a socialist welfare state because He gave away loaves and fishes and circumvented the insurance industry when He raised Lazarus from the dead.

A fair portion of the arguments against Judge Sotomayor, therefore, have been pro forma, along all the old, well-traveled lines. The fact that Mr. Obama nominated a Hispanic woman to the bench, however, has inspired a particularly shrill reaction from the segment of right-wing interested interests that are somehow genetically hard-wired to freak out whenever someone besides a white male gets a gig in government.

It was a canny political move on Mr. Obama's part to nominate an indisputably qualified minority woman to the high court, because in doing so, he has once again scrambled the GOP's eggs. As the Times editorial noted, Judge Sotomayor brings all the qualifications one would expect and demand of a Supreme Court justice to the table, and her qualifications are further enhanced by her rich personal history. She is an excellent nominee, and Senate Republicans - already weakened by consecutive electoral defeats and lavishly despised by a majority of Americans - stand demonstrably incapable of thwarting Obama's choice, and run the risk of further damaging their prospects if they try. [...]

The problem for the GOP is they may have to fight Sotomayor even if it means political suicide. The raving messiahs of the GOP base like Limbaugh are already up in arms over a cavalcade of anti-Obama issues and fighting a range war against so-called "moderates" within the party. Now, they're demanding that Senate Republicans fight to the knife to defeat Judge Sotomayor's nomination. If Limbaugh and his fellow rabble-rousers whip enough GOP base voters into a froth, the Republican Party will be stuck between a rock and a hard place: fail to fight and incite the base, or decide to fight and wind up giving mortal offense to a large swath of Hispanic voters in America.

The GOP has been courting Hispanic voters, with varying degrees of success, for many years now; Hispanic voters are the fastest-growing electoral bloc in the country, and the GOP covets their support in no small part because their survival as a viable party depends on it. If Senate Republicans go after Sotomayor, they run a great risk of alienating an entire generation of Hispanic voters, which simply eviscerates GOP hopes for a recovery at the polls going forward. But if Senate Republicans don't fight the Sotomayor nomination, they run a great risk of further alienating and infuriating the leading voices of an already deranged base, an event that could lead to open revolution within the party and be just as damaging in the long run. [...]

It's going to be a hot summer no matter what. Get ready, and enjoy the show.

GOP Wing-Nutting It On Sotomayor

Reading Between the Lines: Obama Warns GOP That the Right Fights Sotomayor Confirmation at Their Own Peril

At no point in the press conference organized to officially unveil Sotomayor as the nominee was the newly-controversial word "empathy" uttered. In fact, Obama was sure to emphasize as important qualities for a Supreme Court justice a "recognition of the limits of the judicial role," and "respect for precedent" in their role to "interpret -- not make -- law."

No, the message was more of a dare to the right wing than a defense of Sotomayor. As in, "Do you really want this to be the sword you fall on?"

SCOTUS: Get Yer RNC Talking Points Here

Oh my. So much for the super secret wingnutty wurlitzer blast faxer-iffic strategery. The RNC has sprung an unintentional media leak out the wazoo.

Conservatives Blast Obama’s Hispanic SCOTUS Nominee As ‘Not The Smartest’ And An ‘Intellectual Lightweight’

Rove: Attending top schools doesn’t mean that Sotomayor is smart, but it proves that Bush is.

Sessions Goes Off-Message, Admits That Supreme Court Justices Write The Constitution

Gee, what a surprise: The right-wing talking points on Sotomayor are misleading distortions

Again, Media Matters has the goods:

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (2005) notes that federal appellate courts do in fact have a "policy making" role...

Sonia, Maria, Harriet....Whatever.

"Liberal judicial activist."

"Legislating from the bench."

"Far left."

"Hispanic chick lady..." Uh, wha????

There are your run-of-the-mill talking points that you know you're going to hear from the right no matter who the nominee is--yesterday The Hill even got the full list of them when that well-oiled political machine that is Michael Steele's RNC accidentally sent their talking points not just to their jabberers, but to the media they jabber on.

The Sotomayor nomination and the limits of language

Nowhere in this labeling frenzy was there any analysis of Sotomayor's legal decisions -- other, of course, than that as a wise Latina woman the judge naturally detests white male firefighters; just a dulling, deafening repetition of reductionist simplicity -- liberal, liberal, leftist, leftist, radical-radical activist. [...]

While the American Left has been developmentally deficient in thunderous slogans and bumper-sticker intellectuality, the American Right has excelled at them. Its first modern major success was "liberal media," an efficient assault on two political birds with one deceptive stone. And with that success, the right then saw what it took as the unlimited possibilities of make-believe language.

Scraping The Bottom of Barrel

So far the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor are much more revealing about her conservative critics than they are about her.

GOPers already going overboard with ugly (and ridiculous) attacks on Sotomayor

The Republicans just can't help themselves. They can't control their most base instincts. It's instinctive: Must throw every every nasty and racist (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) attack at Sotomayor without regard to the political consequences. This really is who they are.

Sotomayor on the Bench

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Goldstein of the SCOTUS Blog pointed out that the debate over Sotomayor's qualifications seemed to ignore the single most important source of information about her legal thinking: the opinions she's written while serving as a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. While fools like Jeffrey Rosen love to focus on gossip, innuendo and b.s., the rest of us are fortunate to have a detailed, extensive, and public trove of data to analyze. Even better, Goldstein's crew has pulled together summaries of what they consider Sotomayor's most important civil decisions. A sampler...

Flashback: Seven GOP Senators Backed Sotomayor For Judge

Seven Republicans currently in the Senate voted for the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 1998 as U.S. Circuit Court judge, suggesting that Republican ranks could be divided over whether to confirm her to the Supreme Court.

According to the roll call, the seven Republicans who backed Sotomayor at the time are Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe, Robert Bennett, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Orrin Hatch, and Judd Gregg. [...]

If some of these Senators continue to back Sotomayor, it could divide the GOP caucus and kill any efforts by the GOP to filibuster the nominee.

Who Wants Judges With Empathy?

Hypocrisy watch: Under Bush, Senator Grassley and his GOP colleagues demanded an "up or down vote"

Fact Check - In Their Own Words: The Majority's Prerogative

In 2005, many Republican Senators went so far as to claim the filibuster of judicial nominees was unconstitutional. Now four years later, with President Obama's first Supreme Court appointment looming, will they remain consistent in their position or commit one of the most blatant acts of hypocrisy in the 220-year history of the United States Senate?

In Praise of the Nuclear Option

Just like the Judicial Confirmation Network, many prominent Republicans argued -- not so long ago -- that filibusters of judicial nominees was unconstitutional. They threatened to go nuclear. They praised presidential discretion. Media Matters Action Network has compiled video and transcripts of some of their remarks. [...]

On the "Democracy or Hypocrisy" question, I doubt there's any uncertainty at all as to the actual outcome. They'll try to filibuster; they'll need to satiate their base and their baser instincts.