The Sotomayor Rules
Kimberley Strassel writes in the WSJ on the ground rules which Barack Obama wants followed in respect of the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the US Supreme Court.
Ms Strassel compares and contrasts the approach Obama is seeking for Sotomayor with that afforded to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito by Democrats.
She notes some interesting points.
The big question now is whether Republicans agree to play by rules that neither Mr. Obama nor his party have themselves followed.
Why should they?
It concerns Adam that according to Obama:-
it is Judge Sotomayor’s biography that uniquely qualifies her to sit on the nation’s highest bench — that gives her the “empathy” to rule wisely. Judge Sotomayor agrees: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in 2001.
Adam has posted on this ‘empathy issue’ previously. The quote above causes Adam to think that in this instance ‘empathy’ can be interpreted as deciding on racial/ethnicity grounds. He hopes he is wrong. Further, was not Obama the one he sought to transcend race and move America beyond such an approach.
Strassel suggests to Republicans rather than ‘go ugly’
They might instead lay down their own rules, the first being that they will not partake in the tactics of personal destruction that were waged by the left on nominees such as Mr. Thomas or Mr. Alito or Mr. Estrada. But the party could also make a rule to not be scared away from using Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, or future Obama picks, as platforms for big, civil, thorough debates about the role of the courts and the risk of activist judges to American freedoms and beliefs.
Now that seems a debate worth having.
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Adam, that’s a very good article to reference. Skewers the President thoroughly as an unmitigated absolute hypocrit doesn’t it ? Would it be that the Herald or Dominion would run anything like that, or in fact that even most of the MDSM in the USA would front page something like that as perfectly reasonable commentary on the supreme court nomination. Fat chance I fear.
Myself, I find it hard to find out really enough about Sotomayor’s legal qualities to form a solid opinion. So far I feel that judicially she’s a bit suspect but not excessively so, she might make quite a reasonable SC judge. It’s the other “stuff” that makes me wary, rulings that raise ethnicity and gender about the law are a seriously disturbing trend.