Obama’s choice of Sotomayor deserves praise
Excellent column by Greenwald, which begins:
Reports indicate that President Obama has selected Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. The announcement will be made formally this morning at 10:15 a.m. EST. This nomination should be judged principally on two grounds: (1) her judicial opinions (which Scotusblog’s Tom Goldstein comprehensively reviews here) and (2) her answers at her confirmation hearing. But based on everything that is known now, this seems to be a superb pick for Obama.
It is very encouraging that Obama ignored the ugly, vindictive, and anonymous smear campaign led by The New Republic‘s Jeffrey Rosen and his secret cast of cowardly Eminent Liberal Legal Scholars of the Respectable Intellectual Center. People like that, engaging in tactics of that sort, have exerted far too much influence on our political culture for far too long, and Obama’s selection of one of their most recent targets both reflects and advances the erosion of their odious influence. And Obama’s choice is also a repudiation of the Jeffrey-Rosen/Ben-Wittes/Stuart-Taylor grievance on behalf of white males that, as Dahlia Lithwick put it, "a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench."
Obama has also ignored the deeply dishonest right-wing attacks on Sotomayor, beginning with the inane objection to her perfectly benign and accurate comments on videotape that appellate judges, as distinct from district court judges, "make policy." LawyerAnonymous Liberal thoroughly eviscerated that line of attack as the shallow and deceitful argument it is. A similar avenue of certain attack — that Sotomayor said in a 2001 speech that a female Latina judge has experiences that can inform her view of cases — is equally frivolous. There are a whole range of discretionary judgments which judges are required to make; does anyone actually doubt that familiarity with a wide range of cultural experiences is an asset?
Continue reading. As he points out later in the column, Sotomayor is the GOP’s own pick: she was put on the bench by Bush 41.
