It's enough to scare Tom, G. Gordon, Rush and Newt right out of their wits.
What if a white man had said what SCOTUS nominee Maria, er, Sonia Sotomayor blah blah blah blah blah?
Get back to me on that after there have been latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, and only latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, on SCOTUS for... gee, I dunno, say the better part of two centuries. Sheesh.
In other news, Tom Goldstein of the most excellent SCOTUSblog has actually studied each and every one of Judge Sotomayor’s race-related cases. From his SCOTUSblog post:
In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She particulated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.Read Goldstein's complete post here.
Next-to-last word goes to Peggy Noonan: "Republicans, let's play grown-up."
And last word to Matt Yglesias:
Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.
[Oh, and it's So-toe-m'YORE, Mark. Easy-peasy.]
Related:
A Sotomayor core dump
Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation
Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote
They Can't Help Themselves
7 comments:
Hey, cut cur-co-RY-en some slack, eh? It's hard for us Mare-Cans to speak foreign, even if we want to try.
What's that you say? Puerto Ricans are American citizens? That they are taxed, but lack representation in their homeland? That they have been opressed by a larger, neighboring culture after their natural resources and labor capacity? Almost like the Armenians were by the Turks?
Some thoughts on justice Sotomayor's nomination -
First, I oppose any jurist who chooses to inject race or cultural bias into their decision-making. I would be just as opposed to a white male who disparaged the ability of a Latina to understand the dominant culture in my neck of the woods, Kentucky, as Sotomayor has done with her "wise Latina woman versus white male" observation.
Second, I opposed selecting any jurist on the basis of their race or sex.
Third, an examination of her background suggests that she's not quite as "up by her bootstraps" as she and her supporters would have you believe. She attended a private school, and she graduated from the Ivy League into an exclusive Washington law practice. That is not the path followed by someone who was scraping by on food stamps, struggling to overcome her impoverished background.
(On a side note, as it regards her identification with and concerns for the downtrodden - memo to her brother, the doctor - start accepting Medicare and Medicaid patients into your practice. You're making Sis look bad by association.)
Fourth, as a firearms owner and activist for the right to self-defense and firearms ownership, I very much don't care for her positions with regard to firearms. She has rejected Heller in at least one decision. What's she going to tell her potential colleagues on the SCOTUS about disregarding their finding in that case?
Why can't we have a Latina justice, or ANY kind of justice, who doesn't want to use the bench for cultural advocacy?
As for the La Raza thing - when La Raza takes radical positions, as they have sometimes done, then I reject them just as I do racism or culturalism from any other group. And they HAVE done that, even though some might consider their actions or positions as "progressive". Obviously, I myself am not "a progressive". I'm all for progress, but not socialism in another dress.
Aside from all that, nice blog, great design, beautiful photos!
Chaz, thanks for the nice words about the blog! And thanks for a thoughtful post.
Some thoughts on your thoughts.
First, as the guy from SCOTUSblog said up above, "Given [her] record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking." The numbers back him up. In one case, Sotomayor "dissented from the majority’s holding that the NYPD could fire a white employee for distributing racist materials", fer cryin out loud. She stood up for a white bigot.
[Link to the "wise latina" speech.]
Second: jurists have been chosen on the basis of their race [white] and sex [male] since this country was founded. [And boys will be boys, ha ha ha bleccchh.]
Third: Sotomayor went to a Catholic school, not someplace like Dalton, if I recall correctly.
(Side note: at least her bro isn't Brother Billy.)
Fourth: definitely should be addressed during confirmation hearings. [Rifle owner here.]
I'm not aware of any evidence that Sotomayor has used the bench for cultural advocacy, if by that you mean furthering the latino agenda, whatever that might be. [Note to self: locate, consult copy of latino agenda.]
And damn, I hate to say it - but in light of recent events I hope she's got Secret Service protection.
Thanks again for the post and the kind words!
Hey Matt, at what point in someone's career arc do they lose their bootstraps and find themselves shod in silk slippers? Does she have to remain impoverished until at least age thirty? Is it necessary to be raising a trailer full of bastards while working full time and attending night school? Do discipline and good decisions and recognized talent rather early in life mean that a young person is now "privileged?"
When I was getting my Ivy League edjimication, I was also (like most of my classmates) living well below the poverty level in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
Now, for a relative few of my fellow students, grad-school ramen-poverty was a six or seven year stint of slumming. Were anything to go seriously wrong, Daddy was available to net them out of the water.
For others of us, and me in particular, it was a continuation of the vulnerability and financial paranoia on which we'd been weaned. One misstep or mishap could mean disaster. No safety net.
In other words, I'd grown up poor, and made the completely deranged decision to continue in that unsafe state in order to pursue a career that (I was told -- a lie) would provide both personal fulfillment and stability in the future.
Now, I'm not fond of the bootstrap metaphor, nor the mythology that anyone "makes it on her own" without help from individuals and institutions that support poor young strivers.
But I've also rather had it with the fiction that some lucky opportunities early in life are the same thing as the privilege and security that comes at birth to a great many people who squander that unearned happenstance.
I don't know how Chaz morphed into Matt.
I've been renaming people and dogs willy-nilly lately, and need to have my brain switches checked for a bad toggle.
Here you go, Heather ;~)
You OK after that horse ran over you? Yikes...!
Heather - I found your toggle. The dogs had found it before I did. It's not pretty. You might not want it back.
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