Grass-roots conservatives, your attention, please: The NRCC and GOP dumped $1 million of your hard-earned money into radical Leftist Republican Dede Scozzafava’s NY-23′s campaign — money that was squandered trashing mainstream conservative candidate Doug Hoffman, who lost the race by less than 3,400 votes.

Now, the GOP elite Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, is running against Democrat Barbara Boxer by…trashing mainstream conservative GOP rival Chuck DeVore.

Fiorina’s strongest argument against DeVore? He’s a white man and she’s not.

Really:

Asked why she is a better candidate than her Republican primary opponent Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Calif.), Fiorina said that a woman stands a better chance of defeating Boxer.

“I have nothing against white men, I am married to one,” Fiorina said at a breakfast at Americans for Tax Reform. “But Barbara Boxer has defeated [them] over and over again.”

Political observers with long memories should remind Fiorina how Boxer engineered GOP defeat. Bruce Herschensohn, the Republican candidate in 1992, was a staunch and unapologetic conservative talk show host who came within 5 points of beating the San Francisco liberal. Desperate to ensure Boxer’s victory, dirty Dem operatives launched a last-minute smear campaign by shouting about strip clubs.

Herschensohn’s skin color and chromosomes had nothing to do with Boxer’s win.

In keeping with Fiorina’s identity politics-driven campaign, she also said today that even though she didn’t follow the nomination closely, she would have voted to confirm Obama SCOTUS pick Sonia Sotomayor.

An Obama echo, not a choice.

***

Today’s rejected RNC solicitation form of the day comes from reader Genene H:

And from reader Stephen:

I just wanted you to know that the Republican Party called me for the 3rd time in a week. I finally decided to answer and give them a piece of my mind. They wanted money immediately for some rallies at college campuses to oppose Obama’s policies and cited the leadership of Newt Gingrich. I said I was disappointed in Gingrich, and that his support of candidates like Dede Scozzafava in New York, who supported the stimulus bill, union check card, was pro-choice, and pro gay marriage, was too much for me. The guy tried to argue that Scozzafava had gotten a bad rap and had tried to lower taxes and agreed with Republicans on many things, to which I responded that she voted more liberally than 46 other Democrats in NY government! Then I said, her support of Owens after she withdrew from the race kind of confirmed what I thought all along. I left by telling him I would support individual conservative candidates, like Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, but that I would not give money to the Republican party to support candidates like Scozzafava. Thanks for all your great work.

***

More on the Fiorina appearance at AmSpec from Philip Klein.

Along largely partisan lines, the Senate Judiciary Cmte backed SCOTUS appointee Sonia Sotomayor, Pres. Obama’s first high court pick, this morning by a 13-6 vote.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was the only Republican to support Sotomayor. The Senate cmte’s Dems voted unanimously for the Bronx native.

Full confirmation next.

In contrast to Lindsay Graham, Sessions finds nothing “bold” or “edgy” about Sotomayor’s judicial activism.

A clear-eyed assessment:

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he will vote against Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in the committee vote scheduled for Tuesday.

In a column published in today’s USA TODAY, the Alabama senator questioned whether Sotomayor would follow through as a justice on her pledge in confirmation hearings to show “fidelity to the law.”

“I don’t believe that Judge Sotomayor has the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism,” Sessions wrote. “She has evoked its mantra too often.” Saying her testimony and record were at odds, he asked: “Which Sotomayor will we get?”

Awaiting cries of racism in 3, 2, 1…

He squawks several times that “elections have consequences.”

Predicts that she will be no more liberal than Souter.

“Time will tell.”

“There are things about this nominee that are troubling.”

But he’s gonna vote for her anyway.

“Do we want to exclude nominees that are bold? Edgy?”

What I wrote on July 13 when Graham spoke during the Senate hearing:

Graham rambles on about elections having consequences. Says he doesn’t know how he’ll vote. But I think Graham’s Kabuki act is rather transparent. He’ll wait for Sotomayor to reassure him that she can be impartial, and after all his obligatory sound and fury, he will vote for her.

***

Allah’s got the video, in case you need an emetic.

Today, it’s the SCOTUS ceremonial dance with the Senate.

Republicans will delicately challenge Sonia Somotmayor on racial preferences, Second Amendment rights, property rights, sovereignty issues, and her extracurricular speechifying.

Democrats will bloviate about pet causes (“consumer-friendly” laws, the environment).

Sonia the Wise will assuage skeptics with repeated insistences that she’s “fair,” “impartial,” and committed to the rule of law.

Absent that “meltdown,” Lindsay Graham will pronounce himself satisfied with her ritual reassurances.

And Sotomayor will be one cleared hurdle closer to overcoming yet another set of “incredible odds” to complete her “compelling personal story.”

The morning news round-up:

WaPo: Sotomayor and the search for bipartisanship

Dallas Morning News: “Jane Roe” — Norma McCorvey — was one of the protesters arrested yesterday for disrupting the opening day of hearings.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line zeroes in on Sotomayor’s incoherence:

The real question is this: if Sotomayor’s practice is to “strengthen both the rule of law and faith in the impartiality of our justice system” by carefully addressing the “arguments and concerns” of the parties, why did she depart so fundamentally from this practice in the Ricci case?

***

9:45am Eastern: Sotomayor is now fielding questions about Ricci from Sen. Leahy.

Sotomayor told the panel that effective judging is about “keeping an open mind.”

Sotomayor on her wise Latina comment: “I do not believe that any ethnic or racial group has an advantage on sound judgment.”

10:02am: On gun rights, Sotomayor says “one of my godchildren is a member of the NRA and I have friends who hunt.”

Sen. Sessions: “I liked your statements on ‘fidelity to the law.’ If you had been as clear over the last 15 years, we wouldn’t have as many problems today…What do you really believe?”

Soto: “Let me be clear: I believe judges should apply the law, not make it.”

Ritual reassurances, ritual reassurances.

Soto re-explains her wise Latina comments: It was a “bad play on words” that “fell flat.”

So bad she repeatedly used it a half-dozen times before friendly audiences.

Spin, lady, spin.

10:29am Eastern…

Sessions: Will you follow binding SCOTUS decision in Adarand on racial preferences to apply strict scrutiny to government affirmative action classifications?

Soto wanders on disparate impact.

From Senate GOP:

JUDGE SONIA SOTOMAYOR: “[I] Would Not Prejudge Any Question That Came Before Me If I Was A Justice On The Supreme Court.” (Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Senate Judiciary Committee Confirmation Hearing, 7/14/09)

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: “Prejudices Are Appropriate”

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: “I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and gender but attempt…continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.” (Women in the Judiciary, 40th National Conference of Law Reviews. 3/17/94)

###
SENATE REPUBLICAN COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

***

Andy McCarthy tries to make sense of Sotomayor’s Ricci defense:

When Sen. Sessions was grilling Judge Sotomayor on why her panel gave such shoddy treatment to such an important case, the judge kept saying they relied on a “thoughtful 72-page opinion” from the district judge. What she didn’t mention was that before her panel attepted to bury the case in an unpublished ruling, the district judge dug the grave by attempting make certain that no one got to see how “thoughtful” the 72-page opinion was — it, too, was unpublished. This was not an effort to “explain why the law requires what it does”; it was an effort to make the law go away.

***

Legal Times: Sotomayor stays “noncommittal on national security.”

Pretty much the standard, left-wing stance on national security, isn’t it?

Sen. Feinstein praised Sotomayor’s “warmth.” (Did she take her temperature?)

Sen. Kyl made a measured, comprehensive case challenging Sotomayor’s biases and prejudices on race and foreign law.

Sen. Schumer performed a full-on smear of conservatives, claiming they won’t confirm a Hispanic.

Sen. Graham rebuffed that by pointing out Republican support for Miguel Estrada and then challenged Sotomayor’s ethnic-centered speeches. But his main point:

“Unless you have a complete meltdown, you will be confirmed.”

Graham rambles on about elections having consequences. Says he doesn’t know how he’ll vote. But I think Graham’s Kabuki act is rather transparent. He’ll wait for Sotomayor to reassure him that she can be impartial, and after all his obligatory sound and fury, he will vote for her.

***

Must-read: Make sure to read Randy Barnett’s WSJ op-ed on the Seinfeld hearings.

If you suspect this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor will be, like “Seinfeld,” a show about nothing, you are probably right. To understand why, we need to revisit an era that remade how lawyers and the public think about law, and especially the Constitution…

…Today we live in a legal world in which many progressives and conservatives share the legal realists’ preoccupation with results. So justices must be chosen who will reach the politically correct results or opposed because they will reach the wrong results. Judicial confirmation hearings are thereby turned into a game of gotcha, with questioners trying to trip up the other side’s nominees, and nominees quite properly refusing to reveal the only thing their inquisitors truly care about: how they would rule in particular cases that are likely to come before the Court.

But postures must be assumed and questions must be asked. So senators and nominees opine about two empty concepts. The first is “stare decisis” or precedent: Will the nominee follow the hallowed case of U.S. v. Whatchamacallit or not?

***

Sen. Tom Coburn gave a very eloquent opening statement on the rule of law, principles of constancy, and Constitution as our foundational document.

Takeaway quote: “The rule of law is the glue that binds us together.”

Takeaway quote number two: “If we disregard objective consideration of facts, then all facts are subjective.”

Sen. Durbin empathizes with Sotomayor about race and gender. ‘Cuz he’s down with the Wise Latina Ladies.

12:38pm: Senate hearing recesses.

It’s opening day of the Senate SCOTUS hearings on the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. We’ll get gavel-to-gavel coverage this morning on all major networks and CSPAN starting at 10am Eastern.

The good news: At least we’ll be spared Joe Biden’s bloviations.

That’s about the only positive thing I can say about a day that will be dripping in the politics of racial identity and judicial nomination-as-high-hurdles-contest rhetoric.

Wonder which Senator will be the first to bring up her “history-making” status as a Wise, History-Making Person Living With Diabetes?

Latinos are putting conservatives “on notice” and will watch Republicans “like hawks.” Estuardo V. Rodriguez, director of something called “Hispanics for a Fair Judiciary,” told ABC News: “We accept tough questions. But what we are going to object to are questions that misrepresent the judge or that distort her record.” (The group includes the pro-racial/ethnic preference Hispanic National Bar Association, U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.)

Translation: Be quiet about Ricci, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, and the Wise Latina Woman remarks — or else!

I’m reminded of a good column a few months ago by Rachel Campos-Duffy, who happens to be a wise conservative Latina woman:

For conservative minorities, especially conservative minority women, Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination and the warnings from the left not to “bully” her are a reminder of the double standard with which we live out our social and political lives. The recognition that there are two separate rulebooks for minorities: one for liberals and one for conservatives. In the liberal rulebook, whites must be sensitive and considerate of a minority’s life story and the unique obstacles he or she faced and/or overcame. In the conservative rulebook, well, there really is no rulebook because there are no rules. It’s always open season on conservative minorities.

Speaking of open season, it’s open season on Frank Ricci — the lead plaintiff in the Connecticut firefighters’ discrimination case:

On Friday, citing in an e-mail “Frank Ricci’s troubled and litigious work history,” the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters’ attention to Ricci’s past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.

Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he’s dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised.

The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci’s retaliation complaint.

No People for the American Way officials could be reached Friday to speak on the record about the press campaign.

“To go after so sympathetic a plaintiff as Frank Ricci . . . is a new low in the politics of personal destruction,” said Roger Pilon, the director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. “If they were smart, they’d keep a low profile.”

I called attention to the left-wing smear merchants’ campaign in early May against Sen. Jeff Sessions. This is more of the same. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line rightly blasts those targeting Ricci:

Ricci has leveled no personal attack on Sotomayor, and surely will not do so in his testimony. All he did was file a lawsuit that eventually found its way into a courtroom where she happened to be sitting. To be sure, this ended up exposing Sotomayor as too intellectually dishonest to write a real opinion and too ideologically committed to reverse discrimination to reach a decision that a single Supreme Court Justice could agree with. But that’s not Ricci’s fault. I’m certain that when he filed his suit, he hoped that all judges who heard his case would get it right, or at least treat it seriously.

But what of Ricci’s “troubled” history of litigating employment claims. It consists of a suit claiming disability discrimination when one fire department decided not to hire him (Ricci is dyslexic); an administrative complaint claiming that his discharge by that same fire department was in retaliation for accusing the department of safety violations; and the reverse discrimination suit against the New Haven fire department that Sotomayor mishandled.

Isn’t it odd that an outfit calling itself People for the American Way would this history “troubling”? One might have thought that such an organization would applaud challenges to disability discrimination, race discrimination, retaliaton, and safety violations.

Nope. Like I said when Sotomayor’s nomination was greeted with MSM sob-story slobbering, not all “compelling stories” about overcoming “incredible odds” are equal.

***

The witness list via the Senate Judiciary Committee:

American Bar Association Witnesses

Kim Askew, Chair of Standing Committee
Mary Boies, Primary Reviewer

Majority Witnesses

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor, City of New York
Chuck Canterbury, National President, Fraternal Order of Police
David Cone, former Major League Baseball pitcher
JoAnne A. Epps, Dean, Temple University Beasley School of Law, on behalf of the National Association of Women Lawyers
Louis Freeh, former Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Michael J. Garcia, former U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York
Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Patricia Hynes, President, New York City Bar Association
Dustin McDaniel, Attorney General, State of Arkansas
Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney, New York County, New York
Ramona Romero, National President, Hispanic National Bar Association
Congressman Jose E. Serrano, New York 16th District
Theodore M. Shaw, Professor, Columbia Law School
Kate Stith, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Minority Witnesses

Linda Chavez, President, Center for Equal Opportunity
Sandy Froman, Esq., Former President, National Rifle Association of America
Dr. Stephen Halbrook, Attorney
Tim Jeffries, Founder, P7 Enterprises
Peter Kirsanow, Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
David Kopel, Esq., Independence Institute
John McGinnis, Professor, Northwestern University School of Law
Neomi Rao, Professor, George Mason University School of Law
Frank Ricci, Director of Fire Services, ConnectiCOSH (Connecticut Council on Occupational Safety and Health)
David Rivkin, Esq., Partner, Baker Hostetler
Nick Rosenkranz, Professor, Georgetown University School of Law
Ilya Somin, Professor, George Mason University School of Law
Lieutenant Ben Vargas, New Haven Fire Department
Dr. Charmaine Yoest, Americans United for Life

***

Early-morning Sotomayor news round-up…

*WSJ: GOP Looks for at Least 20 ‘No’ Votes .

Opponents of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court suggested they would consider it a victory if more than half of the Senate’s 40 Republicans voted against her in this week’s confirmation hearing, as the GOP grapples with how aggressively to challenge the nominee.

Many Republicans said they viewed 23 “no” votes as a benchmark, because that would be one more than Chief Justice John Roberts received in 2005 and would reflect a significant protest vote.

Others said that if the Senate GOP were to split roughly in half, that would signal support to conservatives who oppose Judge Sotomayor without angering Hispanic voters with a wholesale dismissal of her nomination.

*Gun-rights activists unite against Sotomayor.

*WJLA: Pro-life Activists Protest Sotomayor Confirmation.

***

Liveblogging summary here.

“Sotomayor’s nomination is historic also because she is living successfully with diabetes.”

By contrast, the blogosphere has something other than puff pieces on Sotomayor to offer.

For example: Does Sotomayor have tax problems?

See here from law professor Glenn Reynolds and here from tax professor Paul Caron.

From Ed Whelan at The Bench: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sotomayor and Abortion for Undesired “Populations.”

And from Byron York: What Republicans will ask Sotomayor.

Wall-to-wall TV coverage of the nomination hearings kicks off on Monday. Look for a resurgence of “compelling personal story” stories and high-hurdles talk.

After all, “Sotomayor’s nomination is historic also because she is living successfully with diabetes!”

President Obama applauds the decision as a victory for equality under the law. Not.

Just in…

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

SCOTUS Blog background here. More background here and here.

Tom Goldstein: “Ricci result: Kennedy finds a violation of Title VII. An outright reversal 5-4…the plaintiff firefighters won. New Haven violated the law by throwing out the test.”

Sotomayor = Not so wise now.

***

The Ricci opinion is now available here.

At Cato, Roger Pilon and Ilya Shapiro weigh in.

And Wendy Long at the Judicial Confirmation Network responds to the decision:

Judicial Confirmation Network: NOT EVEN ONE JUSTICE APPROVED SOTOMAYER IN RICCI CASE

“Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error.

“Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

“What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

“The firefighters in New Haven who protect the public safety and worked hard for their promotions did not deserve to become victims of racial quotas, and the Supreme Court has now confirmed that they did not deserve to have their claims buried and thrown out by Judge Sotomayor.”

Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network has more questions for the White House:

* Are you concerned that would have granted the claims of convicted felons in prison that their right to vote had been violated on account of their race or color, just because they couldn’t vote since they were in prison? (Hayden v. Pataki case)

* Are you concerned that she does a disservice to public servants in the ranks of the fire and police departments when she engages in activism, both on and off the bench, to press for racial preferences and quotas to deny jobs and promotions to qualified white police officers and fire fighters?

***

William Jacobson looks at David Brooks’s excuse-making for Sotomayor:

In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks has a novel theory of why Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s Latina identity has worked its way into Sotomayor’s speeches, if not her judicial decisions: Blame it on the 1970′s.

No, seriously. According to Brooks, Sotomayor had bad luck in being born in 1954, because that meant that she went to college and law school in the 1970′s…