Sotomayor Nominated for Supreme Court

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I totally disagree with you. She and you appear to be implying that somehow she has an ability to intrepret the law better because of her "experiences". That is an utter load of a crap. Not to go all "Judge Dredd" on you but "The law is the law". It shouldn't make a single difference what someones racial, sexual, religious, or any other background is when it comes to the law. All her statement does is perpetuate the double standard that it is O.K. to be racist against white men.

Although if I had to pick an experience that is underrepresented I would go with a fat guy.

 

Point made, but I don't see that it matters -- if it is wrong for green people to claim superiority over blue people, then it is wrong for blue people to claim superiority over green people. I do not agree that the context of the claim renders one group the right to engage in behaviour that another group is prohibited from engaging in.

We're in agreement there -- she made a mistake, one that is in the long run a minor one. My point is that if someone else had made the same damn mistake, the majority of Americans would crucify that someone else, and that someone else would never see office. If the majority of the country is able to see past it for her, they should extend that same favor to everyone else.

I don't think that people who are pointing out her mistake are racists. I know for a fact that I am not one. I have no problem with people of any stripe being appointed / elected or whatever into office. I just think that the same standards of judgement should be used on all candidates -- you know, treat them all equally?

 

@ Snook,

I imply no such thing, and in fact I was careful to note otherwise. You must have missed the part you quoted, where I said: indicating that she would reach "a better conclusion" was her big mistake, imo. What she brings is a different - not better - perspective, and thus, would be more likely to make light of certain aspects that other judges may have taken for granted or not have even considered because their life experience was different from hers (and that goes for all justices, not just the white guys). In deference to you: if you were in a group of 10 people, 3 of them Christians, 3 muslim, and 3 atheist, and they had all concluded that it there was nothing wrong with using the term "Sheeny Curse," your unique (in this case) perspective on the matter would, I hope, help change their minds by offering a perspective they hadn't considered, since in their life experience, "Sheeny" holds little or no meaning. In Sotomayor's case, perhaps she has a perspective that would be helpful in deciding the best course of action on, say, an immigration issue, that brings to light aspects of the immigrant experience that may not even occur to the 8 other people on the bench because their parents were all born in this country.

This is why diversity of opinion and background are so important when it comes to handing out rulings that effect large swaths of people. It doesn't make Sotomayor alone a better judge for being different, but it certainly makes the legislative body as a whole a better, more responsible and balanced court. That directly translates into more fairness and, specifically, a more accurate and even-handed interpretation of the constitution. A conservative ideal, if I'm not mistaken.

It shouldn't, but it does. Until the day the courts are run by robots who don't factor their own human experience into their thought process, justices are going to interpret the law by running it through the prism of their own life experiences to ensure that they are handing down the best possible ruling according to the law. We do call them "judges," after all.

Absolute nonsense.

@ LKD,

I agree - but the point is that only by taking her quote out of context can you interpret what she said as a claim of superiority. She's not saying she's better - just that she's got something else to bring to the table.

You aren't. The people trying to sink her and tar her for it are. The people deliberately misreading her rulings, focusing on this issue alone instead of making a more sound opposing argument are.

 

And there it is, "if you oppose her, you are a Racist!" Puhleeze thats as bad as calling someone a Nazi. you have basically conceded the argument.

Hmm, according to that rationale(opposing someone of a different "race"), that must mean Obama is a Racist since he opposed Sam Alito in '06

Oh but i forgot that only white people(specifically conservatives) could be racists. What a load of

On a sorta related note, just what the hell is this crap about "reverse racism"?!? Racism is racism no matter who is discriminating aginst who.

 

It's interesting to me how many folks think racist is an insult, not a descriptor. See: Race Fail 09

 

Geez Amaster, i hope you haven't been following that whole thing. Just the short summary takes 15 minutes to read.

 

Well, the time it takes is less overwhelming when you get in near day one. Playing catchup, now, that's more than a little intimidating.

 

Actually martaug, that wasn't my point or my logic - at all. You really need to work on your reading comprehension if you're going to be throwing around charges like that. The point is, if you take a good look at Sotomayor's record, specifically, the Ricci case, you'd see that far from being a racist, she has actually ruled in favor of a huge racist, defending his first-amendment rights, where she could just has easily have exercised her own personal bias and ruled against him. So she has proved to be fair and impartial even when she had ample reason not to be. In short - the case being made that somehow "proves" she is a racist actually demonstrated the opposite. Since her detractors have no other grounds upon which to base their opposition but race and identity politics, their own prejudice as motivation is what we're left with. You certainly haven't provided an opposing argument on any other grounds than this, so I rest my case.

Let's be clear: it isn't racist to oppose a Hispanic judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on Sotomayor's part. That's fair game. But that's not what's happening, and not the argument you're putting forward. Her detractors are arguing that Sotomayor is a mediocre judge who struck the ethnic jackpot, achieving success through affirmative action rather than her own significant and impressive qualities, Obama is picking her just because she's female and non-white, and that somehow she got this far by being a fire-breathing whitey-hater, despite how overwhelming the evidence against all these ideas is. And any way you try and slice it - that's racist as hell. Not to mention patently dishonest and flat-out stupid.

Oh, and as far as conceding the argument goes, I wasn't the one who just brought up the Nazis.

 

No response, I guess.

 

In reference to one of the last posts on page one, about Republicans complaining about their Court nominees being shot down by Democratic filibusters, refer to the term used to describe the attempted political assassination of a judicial nominee: "Borking."

-Edward Kennedy, RE: Robert Bork's nomination, immediately after the announcement.

Bork was a nominee of Reagan's. The main reason that the Democrats claimed to oppose him is his dismissal of a Constitutional base of a right to privacy, but, generally, they wanted a more liberal judge because there was a fear of the Court's becoming too conservative. Support was drawn up against him and he was eventually voted down, despite many agreeing that it was his politics and not his competency which caused his downfall.

Three or four contentious nominees have generated outcry since then (all attempted Republican appointees) - Douglas Ginsburg, who was nominated for the same vacancy as Bork was shot down because he had used marijuana before. Many of the older Americans here surely remember Justice Thomas' difficult nomination process and I don't think it's necessary to go too much into depth, but there were allegations of sexual indiscretions with a secretary in the past. Last, Harriet Miers (spelling?), who was an incompetent crony who never should have been nominated or even suggested to Bush by Harry Reid. Notably, only three justices have even been denied their nominations, and rarely has there been lengthy debate on the floor of the senate regarding their confirmations; senatorial fights over the justices are a relatively new thing. For a statistical point of interest regarding this point, the two justices confirmed under GWB received an aggregate total of 66 negative votes, and the seven other sitting justices received an aggregate of 69, with 48 of those against Thomas and three of the others being unanimous appointees.

 

That's a good enough reason for me. Sure, die-hard liberals like Ted Kennedy got off message, but dismissing the right to privacy is good enough reason to shoot anyone down. Regarding the claims about it being democrats who generate all the the judicial acrimony, one should remember that democrats have been using the the American Bar Association (ABA) in the evaluation of prospective federal judges. ABA’s judicial ratings had long kept extremists from the right and left, off the bench. Reagan and G.W. Bush*, on the other hand, used The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies -- a national organization whose mission is to advance a conservative agenda by moving the country’s legal system to the right. Clinton's appointees in no way resembled the ideological firebrands appointed by Reagan or George II.

* I left H.W. Bush out for good reason. While H.W. most assuredly tried to appoint conservative judges as Reagan did, he always made sure that the ABA at least rated them as "qualified". For all the acrimony Thomas generated, it's important to realize that it was the allegations of sexual harassment, not his judicial competence or legal stances, that were the cause.

 

That's legitimate, Drew. I think that the problem we have in these sorts of discussions is that, to many people, there isn't a good argument presented in Roe V. Wade for the right to privacy; to them, such an assertion was a means to the end of accomplishing the legalization of abortion. This argument concerning the right to privacy has nothing to do with the morality or legality of abortion, which is a seperate question, but about the lengthy hoops which Warren had Blackmun leap through in his opinion on the case, which are, to many, not very clear in most readings of the Constitution. Some have said that the right to privacy could be better and more accurately expressed as a right to a zone of privacy (sort of coming off of the Third Amendment, which was a response to the tyrannic Quartering Act, and one of the several amendments which have been argued to support the right to privacy) that would be more like the interior of one's home, not the somewhat larger and action-oriented thing that the right to privacy has been made into.

To me, penumbras and emanations are insufficient for the creation of new law, especially when precedent favors a differing conclusion and the issue has no clear consensus amongst voter or electoral populations. The Court seems to me to be an inappropriate location for such a decision to take place, legal questions aside.

 

When the Right to Privacy was successfully used as an arguement against Red Light Cameras positioned on public streets, I knew it had gone too far. When exactly it got there I'm not sure, but I'm betting somewhere in the area of when privacy became more important than life.

In other words, if the privacy concerns of Roe v Wade were applied in other areas, it seems to me that all drug use would be legalized, as would beating your wife/children, abusing pets, and about a hundred other things that most all of us take serious issue with.

 

Sorry DR, was gone for a while.
Now please go back & point out where i said she was racist because of the Ricci decision(which i BTW feel was a wrong decision).
Now why do i dislike the ricci decision? Jonathan Alder answers that much more concisely than i can ricci decision

So we have to accept a bad decision because somebody might sue over it? Not just no but HELL no!

Now i will stand by the statement that if a white man had made a statement equivalent statement he would be tarred and feathered as a racist & run out of town.

At least they have quite saying she would be better on immigrant issues, since, you know, she isn't one.
Her parents were from puerto rico, which makes them U.S. citizens, as per the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917.

 

Then there would of course be those who'd pat him on the back and say that if he was black/hispanic he would have gotten away with it and did really no wrong.

Minorities tend to be more suspicious for any hint of discrimination than majorities since frankly the discrimination of a majority is in a large scale pretty much impossible in the longer run. So while politically lynching a white man for saying such thing might be overreacting a bit, it's still understandable if not somewhat hypocritical.