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.

Those Who Cast Stones Had Better Be Prepared To Duck

One of the many unintended consequences of the right wing's sexist and racist attacks on Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the increased scrutiny of Supreme Court justices who have previously been confirmed. White men who were confirmed by a great majority and whom have been held up by the right wingers as having performed admirably after assuming their positions. Its funny what skeletons you find lurking in peoples' closets once you actually go looking for them.

Today Charles Blow compares the "she is a racist" attack on Judge Sotomayor over words she said in a speech in 2001, to some of the words and acts of former and current Supreme Court justices.

Now let’s look at a couple of the men who have ascended to the bench.

First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”

Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005 making the case that during the same period that he was making those jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”

Gingrich tweeted that “a white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.” Make up your own minds about where Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s words and actions should fall on the racism spectrum, but both were overwhelmingly confirmed.

Until someone can produce proof of words and actions on the part of Sotomayor that even approach the scale of Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s, all I see is men throwing skeleton bones from class closets.

Some how I bet neither Judge Rehnquist nor Judge Roberts appreciate having their bigotted pasts revisted. I am not in the habit of giving wingnuts advice however you might want to quit while you're behind. Right now all you face is losing some Hispanic votes, but if you continue down this path you may well remove all legitimacy of the Republican party itself. Your call.

Keep Em Talking

The usual suspect are upholding their end of the bargain by spewing racist and sexist attacks at Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Now the question is will the mainstream media ask establishment Republicans if they agree with Limbaugh or Dobbs or Buchanan or Coulter. Stay tuned.

See You At The Mid Terms

Conservatives just can't help themselves, and the Republican Party will suffer electorally because of it.





You know its bad when even Megyn Kelly is pushing back.