Sotomayor on track for confirmation

For all the bluster that has been whipped up recently about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, there doesn’t look like there will be much of a way for the GOP in the U.S. Senate to put a stop to her confirmation.

Among the factors working in her favor, Sotomayor has more judicial experience than any of the current justices before their confirmation, has been nominated twice and confirmed twice (by George H.W. Bush to the federal bench and by Bill Clinton to the appeals court), the typical Ivy double (Princeton, Yale Law), was an ADA in New York City (cue the “Law & Order” music), and, as John Dickerson wrote, “saved baseball” by helping end the 1994 baseball strike.

It’s truly disheartening to watch the Senate go through the same round of bullshit that has a tendency to happen every Supreme Court nomination fight. The president (usually) makes a moderate pick on his side of the ideological divide, the president’s party plays up the nominee’s bona fides, and the opposition party picks out whatever mole hill they can find and starts screaming to the rafters about it. Republicans have already begun to do it, Democrats did it during the last administration, Republicans did it before that, and so on.

One of the most absurd bits of information brought up by her opponents is that, at a gathering, she said:

I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that — it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging.

For WR, or you, or your friends, or anyone to say they can make an impartial judgment, which isn’t in any way influenced by a lifetime as one (or another) gender and one (or several) ethnicity, is to be delusional. And, people making such claims have obviously never spent enough time in an ethics class that emphasizes impartiality.

We went through four different media ethics classes between two different universities, and you learn that there is no way you can be perfectly impartial in writing a story. Sure, you reach for it, you strive for it, you do your damnedest, but you will never get there. Hence, why it is important for news organizations to have diverse newsrooms. It is an article of faith in the news community that different people bring different perspectives and will write different ways.

To hear some say it, Sotomayor has a Puerto Rican flag stitched into her shirt and goes to bra burnings.

The bottom line is, she is a qualified jurist. If she wasn’t, a Senate that had a GOP majority in 1998 would not have passed her along to the appeals court with 67 votes. Senate Republicans would be well-served to give her a thorough vetting and vote yea.

But, wait! There’s enough out there for the liberals to get upset about, too. She upheld the Bush administration’s “Mexico City policy,” which denied American funding from international organizations that give information about or perform abortions. In another case, she upheld the right of an employer to search an employee’s computer after suspecting issues involving the employee.

If everything was to run the way it is supposed to, Sotomayor will go into hearings next month, a number of senators and the commentariat will make her life hell for a few weeks, and then she will be confirmed by about the same two-thirds majority she was 11 years ago.