Taking Sonia Seriously

Last time I posted about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, I ruffled some feathers. That wasn't my intention. I still think that when she said her background would allow her to reach a "better" decision than a white male, she misspoke (I hope). A "different" decision would have made more sense, though it still wouldn't have been the most strictly logical thing anyone has ever said. But it was one line from one speech, with a kernel of truth somewhere in it, and I don't consider it a case against her at all. I tend to have a lot of respect for Supreme Court justices, and that cuts across ideological lines. I thought Roberts and Alito deserved confirmation, given all the facts on the table. The president gets to nominate the justices, that's the rule, and I think reflexively battling every nomination based on affiliation just perpetuates the ugly process and ends up hurting "your" president's picks down the road. (Harriet Miers was a different case, of course; one of the times when Bush truly lived up -- or down -- to his caricature. "Hey, there's a friendly lady down the hall. Why not?" Harry Reid also supported the Miers nomination, which is no great surprise. If Reid were president, satirists wouldn't have time for any other targets.)

In this week's New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin addresses the Sotomayor nomination in a brief piece, which starts:

In making nominations to the Supreme Court, Presidents care about diversity, which is a relatively new term for an idea that is nearly as old as the Court itself. In the early days of the republic, when regional disputes were the foremost conflict of the era, nominees were generally defined by their home turfs. So Presidents came to honor an informal tradition of preserving a New England seat, a Virginia seat, a Pennsylvania seat, and a New York seat on the Court. In the nineteenth century, as a torrent of European immigrants transformed American society, religious differences took on a new significance, and Presidents used Supreme Court appointments to recognize the new arrivals’ growing power. In 1836, Andrew Jackson made Roger B. Taney the first occupant of what became known as the Catholic seat on the Court, and that tradition carried forward intermittently for more than a century, with Edward White, Joseph McKenna, Pierce Butler, Frank Murphy, and William J. Brennan, Jr., occupying the chair. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis, establishing the Jewish seat, which later went, with brief overlapping periods, to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, and Abe Fortas.

I think the Supreme Court -- especially compared to the elected branches of government -- is intellectually serious, and that the effort to paint its potential justices into an ideological corner is normally futile. There are enough signs that Sotomayor isn't an easily pigeonholed judge. (Toobin: "...she rejected claims by an abortion-rights group that the Bush Administration had violated the First Amendment by withholding aid from foreign groups that promote abortion.") We'll see if her nomination hearings unearth anything worth giving real pause.

Supreme Sonia?

President Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the next Supreme Court justice. It sounds like the confirmation hearings might not be the same kind of circus they've sometimes turned into in the past: "even Republicans said they have little hope of blocking confirmation barring unforeseen revelation."

The Times article noting the nomination does include this paragraph:

Judge Sotomayor has said her ethnicity and gender are important factors in serving on the bench, a point that could generate debate. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2002 lecture.

Interesting. At first, I was taken aback by that -- if she means that as an absolute rule, it sounds a lot like reverse idiocy. But it's 32 words from her life, plucked out of the context of a larger lecture -- and possibly a question asked at that lecture about a specific situation. In any case, Sotomayor grew up in the Bronx projects, so her nomination should at least, as a narrative, please those who argue that America still has unique mobility opportunities.