So I did This Weak with George Stephanopoulos this morning; knowing that Sonia Sotomayor would be on the agenda, I studied up with SCOTUSblog, which did the unthinkable — it actually looked at Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record. It turned out that my study wasn’t necessary, however — George had read it too!
I think blogs are making a huge difference in our political debate. Without Scotus, the whole debate might have been about wise Latina women and Newt’s Tweets from Auschwitz. Instead, we have some real information getting into the picture.
Oh, by the way: I did my homework on almost all the subjects that might have come up — but I wasn’t at all ready for one possible topic. Luckily, we ran out of time before getting to Susan Boyle.
Benen: MITCH MCCONNELL'S BUSY SCHEDULE...
Like most top Republican officials, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is aware of some of the ugly vitriol against Sonia Sotomayor coming from his side of the aisle. Yesterday, he did his best to dodge it. (TP has video.)Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN Sunday he disagrees with conservative commentators who have labeled Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist, but said he has better things to do than be "the speech police."
"Look. I've got a big job to do dealing with 40 Senate Republicans and trying to advance the nation's agenda, and better things to do than be the speech police over people who have their views about a very important appointment," McConnell told CNN's John King on State of The Union. "So I'm not going to get into policing everybody's speech."
As it turns out, I'm not sure if he does have "better things to do." The smears coming from prominent Republicans -- some in elected office, some not -- run the risk of doing long-term damage to McConnell's party. Indeed, given last week's vitriol, many are watching to see how GOP leaders deal with this debate. It's not unreasonable to think the a Republican leader would be well served making it clear to the public that he sees lines that shouldn't be crossed.
But McConnell has "better things to do."
What's especially odd about this is that others have been willing to do what McConnell is not. Late last week, Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tried to put some distance between the party and the activists trying to smear Sotomayor. RNC Chairman Michael Steele did the same on Friday. Just yesterday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also kept Limbaugh/Gingrich rhetoric at arm's length. None of them has been "policing everybody's speech," but they nevertheless seem anxious to let voters know they're not entirely comfortable with some of the right's rhetoric of late.
So, why isn't McConnell willing to offer similar rebukes?
Drum: The Conservative Soul
On Friday it looked as though the conservative movement was suffering from a personality disorder. The insane half wanted to brand Sonia Sotomayor as a dull-witted affirmative action hire whose seething racist bitterness would soon turn the Supreme Court into a cesspool of radical retribution against whitey. The adult half thought that although she was obviously well qualified, her generally liberal record ought to be challenged and her judicial philosophy debated. Which side would carry the day?
It's starting to look like we've got an answer. Republican senators have been fairly restrained up until now, but by Sunday they were starting to defect en masse to the insane wing of the party:
Several of those same GOP senators said Sunday that they would now make race a focus of the Sotomayor nomination fight — and they were far less eager to criticize conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich for their racially tinged critiques.
Fanning out across network television talk shows, the senators in essence pledged to ask a fundamental question: Can a woman who says her views are shaped by her Puerto Rican heritage and humble beginnings make fair decisions when it comes to all races and social classes?
"We need to know, for example, whether she's going to be a justice for all of us or just a justice for a few of us," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, speaking on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
....Cornyn's comments were echoed in appearances by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee; and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), another member of the panel that will conduct hearings.
....The GOP senators' new tone underscored a sense in the party that Sotomayor's history of speaking about her Puerto Rican heritage had emerged as a surprisingly effective line of attack — particularly as President Obama and other Democrats try to shore up their support among working-class white voters.
Oddly enough, Cornyn has never expressed any concerns about whether a white male judge who rules against affirmative action can be a justice for all of us or just a justice for a few of us. I suppose it just slipped his mind.
In any case, they say that if you want to know what someone is really like, watch how they react under pressure. That's probably true of political parties too, and the Republican Party under pressure is finding — once again — that when nothing else works, appeals to racial paranoia are a "surprisingly effective line of attack." Imagine that.
C&L: Pat Buchanan Calls Sotomayor a "Lightweight" and "Anti-White" Judge
Heather Sunday May 31, 2009 8:07pm
Pat Buchanan on Washington Journal continues his trashing of Sonia Sotomayor as an affirmative action, lightweight, anti-white judge. He repeats the better portion of his May 29th op-ed Obama's Idea of Justice with a few additional insults thrown in for good measure.
Media Matters has an article with his op-ed posted and links to some of his talking points that they've already debunked.
During this interview Buchanan went even further than the op-ed and said this when asked about calling her a "lightweight":
Buchanan: Well I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children's books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you're, frankly if you're in college and you're working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don't think that's college work.
Here's the portion of the New York Times article Buchanan was referencing.
Judge Sotomayor is not known to have identified herself as a beneficiary of affirmative action, but she has described her academic struggles as a new student at Princeton from a Roman Catholic school in the Bronx — one of about 20 Hispanics on a campus with more than 2,000 students.
She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and “re-teaching” herself to write “proper English” by reading elementary grammar books. Only with the outside help of a professor who served as her mentor did she catch up academically, ultimately graduating at the top of her class.
I've heard a lot of ignorant B.S. from Buchanan over the last week or so, but this one takes the cake. He questions whether she actually even graduated at the top of her class or at best deserved to when you see him qualifying the reporting on her class rank with "it said". Then he tries to equate someone doing what they needed to in order to make up for a less than stellar education growing up and equates that with her "college work". Never mind "it said" that she did eventually make her way to the head of the class and overcome that hurdle.
You're a real piece of work Buchanan. I expect we'll be treated to more of this on Morning Joe or one of Pat's other countless appearances on MSNBC for the week.
Buchanan goes on to compare Sotomayor's intellectual rigor to that of, among others, .... Clarence Thomas.
Buchanan: But I will say this. She's going to have an opportunity up before that hearing to demonstrate she's a Scalia, or an Alito, or a John Roberts, or a Clarence Thomas in terms of understanding the law.
Yeah, Clarance Thomas. The guy who doesn't even want to stay awake during court. He then says that her "whole career is about affirmative action". Where the hell is Lawrence O'Donnell when you need him? C-SPAN treated everyone to an hour of this garbage this morning.
Bob Herbert (NYT): The Howls of a Fading Species
BarbinMD (DK): Double Standards From The National JournalOne can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.
Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.
It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.
The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.
Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?
We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”
Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.
Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.
The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?
It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money, reports on the blatant double standards from The National Journal's Stuart Taylor. Here's Taylor on then-nominee Alito:
Alito's critics have similarly ignored much evidence that his 15 years of steady, scholarly, precedent-respecting work as a judge tell us more about him than a handful of widely (and misleadingly) publicized memos that he wrote more than 20 years ago.
... versus what he has to say about Sonia Sotomayor:
And some may see Sotomayor's [innocuous] letter [written as an undergraduate] as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton's Board of Trustees.
As Lemieux says:
So, if I understand correctly, memos Alito wrote directly about important constitutional issues while applying for an important government job should be disregarded, but letters that Sotomayor wrote as a student are somehow important despite their utter lack of relevance to any discernible constitutional issue.
That's what people in the news biz call, "fair and balanced."
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