Here’s what the defenders of Sotomayor’s nomination are saying:
Known as a moderate on the court, Sotomayor often forges consensus and agreeing [sic] with her more conservative nominees far more frequently than she disagrees with them. In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time.
So in other words, by making this nomination, Obama is stabbing his supporters in the back? Yay?
Given that the differences between Republicans and Democrats are largely rhetorical anyway, is this much of a shock?
I’m sure the left-statists will cling to the fact that she’s superior in her judgment by virtue of her gender and race. And let’s not forget, she’s not too big on guns either!
Pat Robertson was on earlier today claiming that she was a bigot and just an affirmative action nomination. He was obsessed with the final 4 candidates all being women. He kept claiming that white men were being discriminated against. The funny thing was that he never really said why he felt that she was not qualified to be on the bench other than that she was a Latino woman.
After that ridiculous ruling about schools being allowed to strip-search young girls I am glad that there will be another woman on the bench.
On judges making policy: my own sense–maybe I took the wrong law school classes–has been that it’s part of the definition of common law judging that judges make law. A great deal of what’s embodied in legislatively enacted codes today was initially created by common law courts. I don’t think that’s overly troubling on its own (and of course there’s a whole libertarian literature–typically the product of people like Epstein and Posner who are well to my right, to be sure–on the superiority of judge-made common law to legislative enactments).
Of course, that doesn’t get at the central point here: I worry that anyone the administration is likely to nominate will be, like Elena Kagan, unduly friendly to claims on behalf of expanded executive power. Certainly, the fact that Sotomayor was appointed to her current position by GHWB doesn’t make me feel better about her in an era in which we’re witnessing a largely undisguised rush to reinvigorate the imperial presidency.
There’s only one thing more pathetic than the rush by mainstream liberals to co-sign the marginalization of their professed ideals yet again: the Right trying to argue that the same woman is an ultra-lefty.
Yet another example of where, when it comes to wingers griping about non-existent “far-left” domination, all I can say is “shit, I wish you actually DID have something to gripe about…”.