History In The Making

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is now Justice Sonia Sotomayor.



I thought about something today that I think will be interesting to keep an eye out for. There has been a lot of talk about how the GOP treatment of Justice Sotomayor will hurt them with Hispanics. But a question that many haven't asked is how their treatment may have affected Justice Sotomayor herself. Don't get me wrong, its not that I think she will shun the Constitution in order to stick it to conservatives. But I do think in a lot of cases there are grey areas. Especially on cases that pertain to race whether it be affirmative action cases or Title IX cases or any kind of discrimination or profiling cases. I keep hearing from some law professors on TV, some of whom I get the impression are just hating (Johnathan Turley I'm looking at you), that Justice Sotomayor will dissappoint liberals and progressives at times. But maybe, just maybe after this debacle she won't.

Obviously it will be impossible to measure how much the disgraceful behavior by the GOP will affect any of her decisions, but I do think it bears watching to see just how "liberal" she ends up voting going forward.

Confirmed!!!

It wasn't really in doubt but it is still great to say it. Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed to the Supreme Court by the Senate.

Reporting from Washington -- Sonia Sotomayor completed an unlikely and historic journey today, one that began with her birth in a Bronx, New York, housing project 55years ago and culminated in her confirmation as the Supreme Court's 111th justice.

When she is sworn into office, Sotomayor will take her place as the high court's first Latino and just its third woman. She was approved by a 68-31 Senate vote after three days of debate. Nine Republicans crossed party lines to support her.

Sotomayor was nominated in May by President Obama to replace retiring Justice David H. Souter. A judge on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for the last 11 years, Sotomayor worked her way through two Ivy League schools and was a Manhattan prosecutor and corporate lawyer before joining the federal bench.

This was also a major victory for President Obama. He said he wanted his nominee confirmed before the new court was seated and he got it done. I wonder how many in the mainstream media will point this out.

Oh and there will be 31 Republican Senators who will have to explain their no vote to their constituents sooner or later. And I don't think its gonna be pretty.

Southern Strategy Part Deux

I think Rachel Maddow is finally waking up to the reality of who her dear old "Uncle Pat" is and what his GOP stands for.

In Related News...

RNC Chairman Michael Steele and three Republican Governors blow off the annual conference for the Hispanic civil rights organization, La Raza, leading their spokeswoman Marie Watteau to release this statement.

“You should certainly speak to the Republican Party about why they’re not here,” Watteau told me. “The Latino community is open to hearing from both sides, which is why both parties were invited. The Republican Party not being here may demonstrate a lack of commitment to our community.”

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination for the Supreme Court was voted out of committee today with only a single Republican vote. The vote came after each Republican who voted no took the opportunity to take more shots at her.


Have fun in that abyss, GOP.

Setting The Rules

Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell has a post up over at the Nation about the hearings for Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and the racist and sexist treatment she received from GOP Senators on the committee. The whole post is excellent but there was one thing that she hit on that I hadn't thought about but which struck a chord with me...

Like Eckford, Sotomayor has been praised for her dignity, her stillness, and the evenness of her voice as she responded to hostile mischaracterizations. She managed to laugh off sexist jokes. She didn't flinch when she was repeatedly interrupted. Senator Lindsey Graham warned that her confirmation could only be derailed if she had "a complete meltdown." The rules of the game were set: the Senators could mischaracterize her record, accuse her of racial bias, and mispronounce her name but she could not respond in kind. She could not be hurt or offended or angry. She had to remain a pillar of rationality and neutrality and control.

Now at the time when Graham made that pronoucement about a "complete meltdown" many media outlets painted it as him hinting at voting for her, or that he ws being a realist. But when I heard it I heard something different but I just couldn't put my finger on it. But I think Professor Lacewell knocks it out of the park with this one. The comment was meant to put her in a box lest she do ANYTHING that could be interpreted in any way as a "meltdown". That meant no angry retorts and no showing of emotion or passion. And in many ways it mean she had to "shuck and jive" in order to make it through the process unscathed. Don't misunderstand me, I am a major proponent of you doing what you have to do to get the job done. So I don't have anything bad at all to say about Judge Sotomayor handling herself accordingly. But I wonder just how many women of all colors watched these proceedings and decided to never to support a party that could be so openly sexist as well as racist as they were in questioning her.

Obviously I will not week for the GOP's electoral difficulties arising out of their treatment of Judge Sotomayor. But its just so curious to me how clueless and mindless these old white men continue to be to the world changing around them.


Update: I just wanted to post this TYT YouTube clip of John Roberts and Sam Alito avoiding answering questions during their confirmation to compare and contrast. Check out how Roberts gets a little heated a couple of times. I doubt anyone said he "melted down" back then but you can bet your ass that had Judge Sotomayor had done the same thing that would be all we were hearing about.

Art Imitating Life

Wyatt Cenac does a bang up job of playing the role of wingnut blogger/journalist/Congressman. I don't know about you but I could actually imagine that kind of a hit job coming from the right wingers these days.


Judgmental

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"Obama Democrat"

The RNC makes a funny. The really funny part however is that I expect after the ass kicking they recieve next fall, the surviving GOP members will start trying to paint themselves as "Obama Republicans".

In related news, Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey*, Chris Christie has endorsed Judge Sotomayor's candidacy to the Supreme Court. Hmmm not only does his endorsement mean less than nothing, its also at odds with the majority of Republicans in the Senate. I wonder why he would announce the endorsement of President Obama's nominee...


*Updated to correct the state where Chris Christie is runnng for governor.

Yep, That'll Do It

I think this attack ad against Judge Sonia Sotomayor may just be the nail in the coffin for the foreseeable future with the GOP's relationship with Hispanics.

A Couple Highlights From The Sotomayor Hearings

First up we have Senator Orrin Hatch getting schooled on the difference between nun chuks and guns.



Next we have known racist Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III PWNING himself by trying to put words in another judge's mouth to attack Judge Sotomayor.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor's judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 "wise Latina" speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices."

"So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum's formulation," Sessions told Sotomayor.

"My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here," Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions's apparent surprise. "We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts."

In fact, while Sessions held up Cedarbaum, a Reagan nominee, as having the superior approach to jurisprudence, Cedarbaum immediately backed Sotomayor. "I don't believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no affect on her approach to judging," she told the Wall Street Journal this morning.

Enjoy

Judge Sotomayor's statement.

You can read Judge Sonia Sotomayor's opening statement here.

Update: Here is the video.

SCOTUS Confirmation Hearing

Tweeting it out most of the day. Ill try to throw up anything of interest but for right now you can find me here.

Backing The Wrong Race Horse.....Again

So I am sure everyone knows by now that for the last several weeks crusty old white racist conservatives like Pat Buchanan have come out strong against President Obama's Supreme Court Justice nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, based almost entirely on a decision she and the rest of her panel made on the infamous Ricci Case in New Haven. Frank Ricci alleged all the way up to the Supreme Court that he and his fellow white officers (and one Hispanic) had been the victims of reverse racism when the city of New Haven through out all of the test scores which were supposed to help decide which firefighters got promotions, because of an apparent racial bias in the outcomes of the test.

Now the Pat Buchanans of the world believe that white men are just such an oppressed minority that they need everyone to watch out for them and show them (gasp) empathy. They have been hammering Sotomayor over and over claiming that her ruling in the case, which reaffirmed a lower court's ruling and was unanimous at the time, evidenced a racial bias of hers against white men. They have held up Frank Ricci as the prototypical hard working (white) Amurican, living out the Amurican dream and overcoming his dyslexia only to be slapped down by that bad, oppressive Latino woman.

How dare she!

You may also know that the Supreme Court recently overturned the decision in a 5-4 ruling which some math challenged crust old racist conservatives like Pat Buchanan decided was actually a 9-0 ruling. As if to emphasize the point that they would be attacking Judge Sotomayor on the basis of some imaginary racial bias the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to bring Frank Ricci in as a witness for the confirmation hearings starting on Monday.

But a funny thing happened on the way to those hearings. It would seem that Ricci just might not be the guy conservatives want representing the Amurican dream after all. That is unless they are now totally reversing themselves on tort reform.

Ricci is invariably painted as a reluctant standard-bearer; a hardworking man driven to litigation only when his dreams of promotion were shattered by a system that persecutes white men. This is the narrative we will hear next week, but it somewhat oversimplifies Ricci's actual employment story. For instance, it's not precisely true, as this one account would have it, that Frank Ricci "never once [sought] special treatment for his dyslexia challenge." In point of fact, Ricci sued over it.

According to local newspapers, Ricci filed his first lawsuit against the city of New Haven in 1995, at the ripe old age of 20, for failing to hire him as a firefighter. That January, the Hartford Chronicle reported that Ricci sued, saying "he was not hired because he is dyslexic." The complaint in that suit, filed in federal court, alleged that the city's failure to hire Ricci because of his dyslexia violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Frank Ricci was one of 795 candidates interviewed for 40 jobs. According to his complaint, the reason he was not hired was that he disclosed his dyslexia in an interview. That case was settled in 1997 with a confidential settlement in which Ricci withdrew his lawsuit in exchange for a job with the fire department and $11,143 in attorney's fees.

In 1998, Ricci was talking about filing lawsuits again, this time over a dispute with his new employer, Middletown's South Fire District—which had hired him in August of 1997. According to a Hartford Courant report of Aug. 11, 1998, Ricci was dismissed from the Middletown fire department after only eight months. He promptly appealed his dismissal, claiming that fire officials had retaliated against him for conducting an investigation into the department's response to a controversial fire. A story in the Hartford Courant dated Aug. 9, 1997, has Ricci vowing "to pursue this to the fullest extent of the law."

In August of 1998, a state Department of Labor investigation cleared Chief Wayne S. Bartolotta of any wrongdoing in the firing. The Aug. 3, 1998, letter from the state Department of Labor indicated that the case was closed with a finding of no violation. "After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the South Fire District did not discriminate against Mr. Ricci." Ricci's response? According to the Courant, Ricci contended "Their decision was political, it has nothing to do with who was right and who was wrong." He told the paper he would "pursue the matter in civil court."

Ricci also tried to discredit his former boss, Chief Bartolotta, by disparaging his professional credentials. His fight over access to Bartolotta's professional training records was resolved between the two of them a week before the matter was slated to be taken up with the state Freedom of Information Commission, according to a Jan. 13, 1998, report in the Hartford Courant.

Eventually, Ricci made his way back to the New Haven Fire Department, where he famously aced his promotions test, then sued, yet again, in 2004.

BUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

gasp, breathe, gasp

BUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So basically this is a guy who has gotten just about every job he has ever had either buy suing or threatening to sue his employer. You have got to love this story.

Its called vetting, Republicans. We know its not something you like to do as evidence by the choice of Sarah Palin for VP last year but damn!

Yeah I can't wait to see how this "hail mary" pans out for yous guys LOL.

More Powell Less Palin

I am not in the habit of giving Republicans good advice, but if I were I would definitely tell them that right now they need to try to look to people like Colin Powell for guidance on how to make a comeback, not people like Sarah Palin.

Activist Judges

Chuck Todd throws the conservative talking points right back at Joe Scarborough.

Priceless.

Ricci Ruling

In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court decided for the plaintiffs with the conservative wing all voting for the plaintiffs and the 4 more liberal justices all dissenting.

I am far from being a legal scholar but I will say that this doesn't seem like it will be the "ammunition" that conservatives were hoping for to use against Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Also I admit my unfamiliarity with these things but I was struck that in addition to Justice Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion, you had several "concurences" written by other conservative justices as if they all needed to help out and speak out to justify the decision. Now again maybe that's normal, I don't know.

What was most odd to me was that Justice Alito's concurrence seemed like nothing more than an attack on the dissent rather than illuminating anything having to do with the merits of the case. And it wasn't very compelling reading or reasoning either, at least for this layman.

The other thing that struck me was how strong Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's dissent was. She raised issues about the case that had not been discussed at all in our drive by media. I guess the most compelling argument was this one.

As a result of today’s decision, an employer who discards a dubious selection process can anticipate costly disparate treatment litigation in which its chances for success—even for surviving a summary-judgment motion—are highly problematic. Concern about exposure to disparate-impact liability, however well grounded, is insufficient to insulate an employer from attack. Instead, the employer must make a “strong” showing that (1) its selection method was“not job related and consistent with business necessity,” or (2) that it refused to adopt “an equally valid, less discriminatory alternative.” Ante, at 28. It is hard to see how these requirements differ from demanding that an employer establish “a provable, actual violation” against itself. Cf. ante, at 24. There is indeed a sharp conflict here, but it is not the false one the Court describes between Title VII’s core provisions. It is, instead, the discordance of the Court’s opinion with the voluntary compliance ideal. Cf. Wygant, 476 U. S., at 290 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (“The imposition of a requirement that public employers make findings that they have engaged in illegal discrimination before they [act] would severely undermine public employers’ incentive to meet voluntarily their civil rights obligations.”).

(I apologize for formatting but pdf and I are not friends)

I have to say that this argument is a strong one to suggest that this was not the correct ruling on this issue and implies that as Justice Ginsberg stated it probably should have instead been remanded to a lower court for further clarification. Truly any business or municipality now finds itself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If they use a hiring or promotion practice that convincingly statistically shows a racial bias they question is do they be proactive in order to try to be Title IX compliant and risk another expensive Ricci type case? Or do they keep the status quo and not only potentially allow discrimination to go on but also open themselves up to a similarly expensive lawsuit from minority employees or prospective employees who feel they have been discriminated against?

It seems this ruling offers more questions than answers.

But all in all its good news for John McCain!

GOP=FAIL

Well waddya know...

The new poll by the non-partisan firm Research 2000 for Daily Kos strongly suggests that the two main right-wing talking points about Sonia Sotomayor are a bust.

First, on the claim, echoed by many mainstream conservatives and GOPers, that Obama’s call for “empathy” in a judge is a cause for concern:

Do you think empathy is an important characteristic for a Supreme Court Justice to possess or not?

Yes 52%

No 29%

Not sure 19%
…and then, on the claim by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich (who subsequently retracted it) and others on the right that Sotomayor is a “racist”:

Based on what you know or have heard about Sonia Sotomayor do you think she is a racist?

Yes 8%

No 61%

Kinda makes E.J. Dionne look silly doesn't it?

Thousands Of NRA Members' Heads Just Exploded

Conservative Judges Echo Sotomayor in Gun Ruling

Stay Classy Miguel Miranda.

Greg Sargent reported earlier today that former hacker in the "Memogate" scandal, Miguel Miranda, is leading an effort to pressure Republican Senators to attack Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Now Greg is reporting that Miranda has made a racist statement about black people.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

I would hope that Republican Senators will be questioned about Miranda's statement IMMEDIATELY and asked if they will continue to take his calls about Judge Sotomayor. Its time to pull the veil off of this bullshit and confront the racism that still exists in this country. And ain't no time like the present.

Its Karma Baby

For the last week following the announcement by President Obama that he was nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan have been banging their wingnut drums calling her a racist. I don't think it escaped anyone how ironic such a charge was coming from two men who made numerous blatantly racist and nativist statements in the past on the record. But in the past they have always left themselves the slightest bit of wiggle room to try to explain away their words. They have always maintained that they weren't racists and people had just taken them out of context. Of course they make no such concessions for Judge Sotomayor's words even though they didn't come close to approaching the vitriol spewed over the years by either man.

Well as fate would have it now both Tancredo and Buchanan are now faced with a very embarrasing situation of their own. You see in a twist of fate they share an executive director, Marcus Epstein who has made it very obvious that he is a racist. Once again we have to ask if our media is going to hold their feet to the fire and ask them if after all of the venom they have been spitting at Judge Sotomayor about racism, if they are willing to denounce one of their own.

On July 7, 2007, Marcus Epstein had too much to drink and stumbled onto Georgetown’s scenic, shop-lined M Street, walking in no particular direction. At 7:15 p.m., he bumped into a black woman, called her a “nigger,” and struck her in the head with an open hand. An off-duty Secret Service agent was watching. Epstein “jogged away,” according to the agent’s affidavit, and when Epstein was finally chased down, he “continued to flail his arms while being taken into custody.”

snip

Epstein was, and still is, one of the utility players in the immigration restrictionist fringe of the conservative movement, the executive director of both Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) Team America PAC. Before and after the 2007 incident, Epstein worked (in an unofficial capacity) with Tancredo on his immigration-focused presidential campaign. He organized policy debates between conservative writers and leaders, including one with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) that was broadcast on C-SPAN. Epstein built coalitions and hobnobbed at Washington parties without much trouble, despite a record of controversial race- and immigration-focused writings and awareness that something bad — the details weren’t clear — had happened in 2007 that convinced him to go on the wagon.

snip

Since May 19, when the watchdog group One People’s Project released the legal documents detailing Epstein’s arrest, the activist and his employers have come under fire. By late Monday, the University of Virginia Law School was telling reporters that Epstein would not be joining the class of 2012, even though he had planned to retire from his jobs at the end of June and “more or less suspend my political activities” to attend the school. But Epstein’s career up through yesterday was marked by controversial articles and speeches, happy feuds with politically correct organizations like the One People’s Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and no serious blowback from the mainstream conservative movement. (In 2008, Epstein contributed to the Southern Poverty Law Center in order to win a place on its “Wall of Tolerance” and to warn the group that it was “just one degree of separation away” from him.) Epstein’s past only became an issue after his patrons, Tancredo and Buchanan, spent a week bashing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a “racist” and an an “affirmative action” candidate.

“It’s a huge breakthrough,” said Darrell Jenkins, a co-founder of the nine-year-old One People’s Project. “This game that keeps being played on the right, the way that their leaders will say anything and claim that they’re not racist — that got knocked out the window. Now we have proof that someone of that stature is running around like an idiot in the streets. Why would a Tom Tancredo associate himself with a Marcus Epstein? If he’s going to go after Sotomayor for an out-of-context quote from 2001, he’s got to answer for this.” Jenkins added that he would “be in the courtroom” when Epstein is sentenced.

Epstein, who turned 26 in May, has spent his entire adult life courting controversy. In 2003, as the president of College Libertarians and the editor of the conservative newspaper at the College of William and Mary, he argued that conservatives erred by appropriating the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. instead of remembering his “philandering and plagiarism.” Before and after graduation Epstein carved out an online identity as an old-line, nativist conservative, contributing to the immigration restrictionist web site VDare.com. When he began working for American Cause, Epstein became a young and energetic proponent of ideas that were often attributed to angry, aging white men. “Pat graciously gave me an audio CD version of the book,” Epstein wrote in an article criticizing National Review for not reviewing Buchanan’s “State of Emergency,” an anti-immigration jeremiad. “The facts that he laid out in the book, made me so impassioned, upset, and often angry, that on more than one occasion, I literally had to pull over to a rest stop to compose myself for fear that I would get in a road rage incident.”

So will the hosts at MSNBC ask Pat Buchanan about Marcus Epstein the next time he goes on a rant about Judge Sotomayor? I guess there is only one way to find out.

....Said The Racist White Man.

I just had to chuckle when I saw this Jeff Sessions, talk about how sensitive we have to be about race when it comes to Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor this morning on Meet The Press.

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Just to refresh your memory.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions 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. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings

One can only wonder why the king of "gotcha" moments when it comes to Democrats, David Gregory, didn't bring up Senator Sessions own racist past during the discussion today. Hmmmm....