The problem with the nomination of Clarence Thomas, aside from the whole Anita Hill angle, was that he had very little relevant experience to be a Supreme Court judge. In the 1970’s, he had served as an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri for a few years, had been an attorney for Monsanto for three years, and was a legislative assistant to Sen. John Danforth for a while. In the 1980’s, he joined the Reagan administration as the Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights, and then served as Chairman of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In March 1990, he began serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He had only been a judge for 19 months when he was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.
It was rather obvious that the Poppy Bush administration wanted to appoint someone black to replace Thurgood Marshall (who had argued the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case for the NAACP). But, it was also obvious that they were picking Thomas because he was anomalously conservative for a black man. There were many more qualified black judges than Clarence Thomas.
It’s clear that the Obama administration wanted to pick a woman to be on the Court because it currently has 8 men and 1 woman. It’s also clear that the Obama administration had an interest in nominating the first Latino Justice. From that standpoint, there are some similarities with Thomas. In both cases, elements of race and life-story played a part in the selection process. But Sonia Sotomayor is about as qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice as it is possible to be. There may be other judges who are more qualified in some objective sense, but it’s doubtful if there are any Latinas who are more qualified. Moreover, she wasn’t selected primarily because of her ideology, as Thomas clearly was. Sotomayor fits several needs/desires at once without sacrificing anything in terms of quality. That’s why she is not a token candidate in the Clarence Thomas mold.
But, don’t tell that to Debbie Schlussel:
Our President chose this chick because like, J-Lo, she’s a Puerto Ricana from South Bronx who went from rags to semi-riches. And that’s it. That’s the whole reason. What a joke. Guess I’m gonna have to refer to her as “Justice J-Lo,” once she gets confirmed by the Democrat dominated Senate. After all, neither J-Lo or So-So have set any remarkable legal precedent in their lives. Neither have achieved legal greatness, and one of ‘em is about to become a legal Supreme.
Here’s a few other ideas for why Obama might have picked her. He could relate to the fact that her father died when she was nine years old and was absent from her upbringing thereafter. He could relate to her educational experience because they both got into Ivy League schools (Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are both Princeton alums) and both earned Ivy League law degrees, despite being racial minorities from humble beginnings. He, coming from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, could relate to someone that calls Greenwich Village home. In other words, Sonia Sotomayor has a tremendous amount in common with President Obama. He just might have picked for that reason.
The wingnuts are getting more and more frantic as the days pass. I Ms Sotomayor is getting government protection. The way things are going, she needs it.
Maybe if Obama had named a real liberal the professional racists like (what else?) Debbie would have gone up in a puff of brown smoke and America would have gotten a higher average IQ. Missed opportunity.
As David Souter taught us, it’s very hard to predict how a justice will turn out once they no longer need to craft every opinion with an eye toward later advancement.
Well, Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and Alito were very easy to predict, actually. What I wonder though, is just who Debbie imagines “set remarkable legal precedent in their lives” (whatever that may mean.) Though i suppose staging a coup is indeed something of a precedent.
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
G. Gordon Liddy makes a Sotomayor menstruation joke and reveals he’s probably never had sex with a woman. Folks like Stussel call the Judge J-Lo and So-So and reveal they’ve never had any meaningful relationship with a Hispanic person, and don’t care.
And the more they bloviate, the more outrageous the slurs, the more they build up disgust and fatigue for their worldview.
Which makes passing immigration reform a little easier, since the public will be tired of these arguments and will turn on them or tune them out when re-focused on immigrants and Hispanics at large sometime after Sotomayor’s confirmation.
The wingnuts are wasting their powder on her. I don’t know if that’s part of the Administration’s plan, but the odds of a political two-fer that could cement Hispanics in the Democratic camp are going up by the minute.
No message discipline and no tactics. It’s amazing how quickly things have disintegrated inside the GOP.
“Legal greatness”.
What does that mean? Legal greatness is a broader concept than being smart or being qualified. I’d say it means doing something that will live on and change the world legally.
I’m trying to think of a justice on the current supreme court who could be said to have achieved any level of “legal greatness” before being appointed to the court. The mere fact of spending a great part of your life as a federal judge almost precludes legal greatness because most of what you do is follow precedent.
Ironically probably the only person who may have achieved legal greatness before coming onto the court is the other woman on the court – Justice Ginsburg who had already earned her place in legal history for taking equal rights cases to the supreme court as chief litigator for the ACLU women’s rights project and pushing the concept of gender equity into the law.
There were a number of Black Republican Judges that 41 could have chosen.
None of them were boot licking Slave Catching Coons like Unca Clarence.
Period.
Sotomayor was Phi Beta Kappa. I doubt Unca Clarence can spell that.
She was Yale Law Review.
She has more experience than any nominee in 70 years.
I’m LMAO and tipping my hat to The President.
Everytime they try and justify their racism against this woman, it become plainer for those that always wanted to give them ‘ the benefit of the doubt’, as to the extent of their racism.
Unca Clarence is a TOKEN..in every sense of the word.
Who sits on the Supreme Court and doesn’t utter ONE WORD during an entire term?
Someone whose opinions are the equivalent of looking at Scalia’s and writing
‘ what he said. ‘