Michelle Malkin » The Supreme Court high hurdles contest

The Supreme Court high hurdles contest

By Michelle Malkin • May 27, 2009 09:33 AM

Able to leap tall life obstacles in a single bound!

Not all “compelling personal stories” are equal
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

Since when did securing a Supreme Court seat become a high hurdles contest? The White House and Democrats have turned Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination into a personal Olympics event. Pay no attention to her jurisprudence. She grew up in a Bronx public housing project. She was diagnosed with childhood diabetes at 8. Her father died a year later.

And oh, by the way, did you hear that she was poor?

It’s a “compelling personal story,” as we heard 20,956 times on Tuesday. Sotomayor’s a “real” person. Why, she even read Nancy Drew as a young girl, President Obama told us. She’s “faced down barriers, overcome the odds and lived out the American dream that brought her parents here so long ago,” Obama said.

If Sotomayor were auditioning to be Oprah Winfrey’s fill-in host, I’d understand the over-the-top hyping of her life narrative. But isn’t anybody on Sotomayor’s side the least bit embarrassed by all this liberal condescension?

Republicans are not allowed to mention Sotomayor’s ethnicity lest they be branded bigots, but every Democrat on cable television harped on her multicultural “diversity” and “obstacle”-climbing. President Obama made sure to roll his r’s when noting that her parents came from Puerrrrto Rrrrico. New York Sen. Schumer stated outright: “It’s long overdue that a Latino sit on the United States Supreme Court.” Color-coded tokenism dominated the headlines, with blaring references to Sotomayor as the high court’s potential “first Hispanic.” (Not true.)

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill – one of the leading Democrats tasked with guiding Sotomayor through the nomination process — carried the “compelling personal story” talking points to the tokenist extreme in an interview on Fox News:

“If you look at what this woman has been through, and the obstacles that she has had to overcome, I think she does have a richly, uniquely American experience that makes her incredibly qualified to pass judgment on some of the most important cases in our country,” McCaskill asserted. “Overcoming incredible odds and I think that is new to the courts. There have been a lot of privileged people that have landed on the Supreme Court. The fact that she has lived the life of the common American, trying to grow up in public housing, reaching for scholarships, reaching for the courtroom as a courtroom prosecutor, all of those things will make her a better and wiser judge. And I don’t think that is identity politics. I think that is the American experience.”

Clever. Challenging Sotomayor’s credentials and extreme views on race and the law is not merely anti-Hispanic. It’s anti-American!

More significantly, Sen. McCaskill waved the high-hurdle card after being asked to defend Sotomayor’s infamous statement at a 2001 University of California at Berkeley speech asserting brown-skin moral authority: “I would hope 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.” McCaskill actually denied that Sotomayor had make the remarks, then argued the words were taken out of context.

You want context? It’s even worse than that soundbite. As National Journal legal analyst Stuart Taylor reported, “Sotomayor also referred to the cardinal duty of judges to be impartial as a mere ‘aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.’ And she suggested that ‘inherent physiological or cultural differences’ may help explain why ‘our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.’” The full speech was reprinted in something called the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal. “La Raza” is Spanish for “The Race.” Imagine if a white male Republican court nominee had published in a law review called “The Race.”

The selective elevation of hardship-as-primary qualification demeans the entire judiciary. If personal turmoil makes one “incredibly qualified to pass judgment on some of the most important cases in our country,” let’s put reality-show couple Jon and Kate Gosselin on the bench. Millions of viewers tune in to watch their “compelling personal story” of life with eight children on television. It’s a “richly, uniquely American experience” of facing obstacles and overcoming the odds. Get them robes and gavels, stat.

McCaskill’s assertion that “overcoming incredible odds” is “new to the courts” is ridiculous. Is she arguing that Thurgood Marshall, Felix Frankfurter, and Sandra Day O’Connor faced lower hurdles than Sotomayor? And how about Clarence Thomas, a descendant of slaves, grew up in abject poverty in the South without a father. The object lesson, of course, is that not all compelling personal stories are equal. Thomas’s crime, of course, was embracing the wrong ideology. So his incredible set of odds and obstacles don’t count in left-wing eyes.

Democrats are eager to celebrate diversity, you see, as long as the diversely-pigmented pledge allegiance to the Left for life.

***

Slublog in the Green Room spotlights the NYTimes editorial on Sotomayor today, which illustrates my point precisely.

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#709441

On May 29th, 2009 at 7:12 am, Danceswithdachshunds said:

New bumper sticker -

BORK SOTOMAYOR!
#709466

On May 29th, 2009 at 9:27 am, Ragspierre said:

Make the case for individual vs. group rights, for justice vs. empathy. Then vote to confirm Sotomayor solely on the grounds — consistently violated by the Democrats, including Sen. Obama — that a president is entitled to deference on his Supreme Court nominees, particularly one who so thoroughly reflects the mainstream views of the winning party. Elections have consequences.

Vote Democratic and you get mainstream liberalism: A judicially mandated racial spoils system and a jurisprudence of empathy that hinges on which litigant is less “advantaged.”

A teaching moment, as liberals like to say. Clarifying and politically potent. Seize it.

http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2009/05/29/sotomayor_criticize,_then_confirm?page=2

This is the way to handle this, IMNHO.

Respectfully, no person of conscience should EVER consider “Borking” anybody, because that was an exercise in lying, and in the foulest form of character assassination. The people who did it were (are)morally reprehensible.

If anything, the treatment of Thomas was worse. It has become a pattern with our unprincipled opposition.

They recognize no rules, and I have argued and do argue that there are no rules in such a case.

BUT…regardless of rules…when it comes to a simple question of truth v. lies, decency v. evil, we have GOT to always follow the high road.

That means we act as people throughout our history, until recently, act when faced by an otherwise qualified nominee under “advice and consent”. We respectfully but thoroughly inquire, and…unless there is good reason not to…we give the President their choice.

He then gets to live with the consequences. As do we all…
#709493

On May 29th, 2009 at 10:34 am, lgm said:

Danceswithdachshunds said (#177):

New bumper sticker -

BORK SOTOMAYOR!

That means: use her vocal opposition to decisions such as Griswold, and principles such as the right to privacy (ninth amendment), as a reason to vote against her. Good luck.
#709515

On May 29th, 2009 at 11:18 am, DBNinKY said:

Sotomayor is a Catholic Hispanic, and there are no decisions to determine where she stands on social issues like abortion or even gay marriage.

The Left may have it’s own Souter in a SC Justice Sotomayor, and wouldn’t that be scrumptious!
#709522

On May 29th, 2009 at 11:29 am, DBNinKY said:

BTW – when critics once derided the Burger Court for displaying no discernible “theme,” Justice Powell wisely responded by asking could a litigant retain confidence in a Court that rendered decisions on a set philosophy rather than “applicable law.”

Seeking justices who display “empathy” over precedent in judging cases is no different; it is an attempt to imprint upon the highest court in the land a philosophy that comports the Constitution to its own ideology of emotion over law.
#709531

On May 29th, 2009 at 11:49 am, RetFireman said:

This person is a racist, a bigot, a sexist and more. How she has been allowed to continue on the way she has for this long is nothing more than an excercise in the damage that Liberalism is able to do and does on a daily basis in this country.

How many cases has she judged based on her contempt for Whitey? How many times has she been able to legislate and “create policy” instead of interpret the Law?

The amount of destruction she will be permitted to do if allowed to sit for the rest of her life on the bench of the highest court in the land is unfathomable…unconscionable.

Do NOT allow these Socialist, Leftists, to intimidate you. Yes, there is racism here…but it is coming from THEM and it is so loud, it is deafening. Not only should she not be rewarded for her life-long work in racism, she should be stripped of her current position, have every single case she has ever sat on reviewed for any chance she used racist viewpoints or legislated from the bench and never, EVER be permitted into a courtroom where she has the opportunity to make decisions ever, EVER again.
#709594

On May 29th, 2009 at 12:39 pm, MacEamonn said:

Senator John Cornyn of Texas threw Newt and Rush “under the bus” in an interview with NPR. I would suggest it is time to throw most of the current Republicans, including Cornyn, out of office and find some people who’ll stand up for the Constitution.
#709603

On May 29th, 2009 at 12:53 pm, Ragspierre said:

lgm, as is typical, shows that he and his Statist fellows have no integrity…

WHATSOEVER.