This should be an enormously fascinating week of hearings, and I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts as we go.
My first thought – Just watched Leahy and Sessions open the hearings. Leahy was good, but Sessions was lights out. I have not before heard such a penetrating and reasonable critique of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination. He managed to go right for the jugular on her views on race and ethnicity without going over the top and without sounding angry and calling names. If – and that’s a big if – Republicans can continue to oppose Sotomayor with the good arguments and temperament just displayed by Senator Sessions, they may be able to put a big dent in the vote count against Sotomayor.
UPDATE: Sen. Orrin Hatch is using Obama’s history of judicial nomination voting to blow apart his administration’s handling of the Sotomayor nomination. He outlined the three criteria Obama gave for developing his opposition to California’s Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American conservative, including evaluation of whether the nominee used only the law and not personal feelings to make decisions, review of outside speeches and articles in addition to judicial decisions, and putting aside personal characteristics such as race and gender to focus only on the judicial philosophy of the nominee. This is a win-win approach for Republicans, because it means either that Obama is a hypocrite or that their opposition to Sotomayor is legitimate. Like Sessions, this was very, very effective, and I would recommend catching video of these two statements if you missed them.
Of course opposition to Sotomayor based on judicial philosophy and personal beliefs is fine, and any material which can bring light to those beliefs is thus also welcome. If this confirmation hearing is merely about judicial philosophy and there are substantive differences between Sotomayor’s ideas and the Republicans’ ideas about proper jurisprudence, any critique of judicial philosophy is fair game and a legitimate reason for opposition. I don’t think anyone, including Obama, said otherwise. I’m not saying, though, that I believe there actually are huge differences between Republicans and Sotomayor on philosophy. Republicans, whatever they may think, are not going to have an easy time trying to pin her down as some sort of judicial radical. A review of all of her decisions reveals she decided with other judges on her panel, conservative and liberal more than 95% of the time. Even in the New Haven case she was following the precedent set by the lower court. Trying to accuse her of being a judicial radical is simply a non-starter, and any honest review of her decisions will show she’s *well* within the mainstream of judges,
If this confirmation hearing, which I think is more likely, is based on whether or not she is qualified, based on her experience on the bench, to sit on the Supreme Court, then there really isn’t any room here, without outright deception, for opposing her.
As for the post lower on the page, comparing Sotomayor to Harriet Miers is ridiculous. Harriet Miers had no judicial experience, and was basically a DOA nomination, someone who was clearly not qualified to sit on the court. Sotomayor has many many years of the federal bench on her side, and on experience alone, this confirmation hearing is over.
Even Lindsey Graham said in this very hearing,, “Unless you have a complete meltdown, you are going to get confirmed.”
It seems to me that if Hatch and Sessions’ arguments aren’t taken very seriously, this confirmation will set a dangerous precedent – i.e., there are huge problems with the nomination, but we’ll force it through anyway rather than finding a better candidate.
Am I wrong, or did Jeff Sessions vote for Alito – another judge who fairly asserted the importance of his personal experiences durting his hearings (saying things, among others, like, “When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.”)? And here is Mr. Sessions last week: “I will not vote for — no senator should vote for — an individual nominated by any president who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their own personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court.” Gag.
Rather than a “win-win” strategy for the GOP, these hearings simply highlight the extreme partisanship that’s on show from the Right….to the point that hearings like this are basically useless as tools to truly vett a candidate’s qualifications and background.
And, given that this post/blog seems to be patting Mr. Sessions on his back for being “lights out”, I feel compelled to remind readers/writers of his questionable – and relevant – past, as Mr. Sessions has been on the other side of the table, as it were.
Twenty-three years ago he was engaged in the fight of his life. He was appointed a U.S. attorney in Alabama in 1981 and was nominated to become a U.S. District judge by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. J. Gerald Hebert, a career Justice Department lawyer, testified that Sessions had once called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” He said that they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” He sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. He is said to have made remarks that he thought the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana. He said these comments were made in jest. Right.
Sessions faced a heated round of questioning from Sen. Edward Kennedy, who called him “a throwback to a shameful era,” and then Sen. Joe Biden. The committee held four hearings during one of which Sessions pleaded that “I am not a racist.” Hebert also testified that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. His nomination failed in committee on a 10 to 8 vote, with Specter joining the nominee’s original patron, Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) in dooming the nomination.
And now this guy is the “lead” from the Right on the confirmation hearings for the first Latina candidate to the Supreme Court. Uh huh…..I’m sure she’ll get a fair shake. Go get her Jeff – “lights out.”