May
27
Yeah, this was pretty predictable
May 27, 2009 | 6 Comments
Prepare yourselves for a shock, but Grima Wormtongue Doug Kmiec has come out in support of Sonia Sotomayor. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the surprise.
Sooner or later the Catholic faith of Judge Sonia Sotomayor will be raised as an objection to her nomination and appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Right Doug. The left will no doubt get all indignant about her staunch Catholic faith and rise up in opposition to her. Those of us living out here in what’s called reality, however, will wait awhile before holding our breaths in anticipation of such an occurrence. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and side with Feddie when he suggests that we probably aren’t going to see the same level of anti-Catholic vitriol.
Judge Sotomayor is a moderate.
Compared to who? Harry Blackmun? William Douglass? And are these words of a moderate?
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Kmiec delves further in wishful thinking land.
As a consequence, she is just as likely to be attacked from left as from right. That’s probably not what President Obama means by common ground, but one can admire him for finding a woman seemingly so capable of adhering to the law rather than her personal opinion, and for on occasion, even resolving cases contrary to the president’s own policy perspectives.
Is there anyone buying this? At this point I don’t know if Kmiec is trying to fool himself or his audience. There is nothing in Sotomayor’s record to suggest moderation. While she may not be a raving liberal, her track record indicates who will certainly more than follow in David Souter’s footsteps, and may even tack even further left on economic issues.
But Kmiec has a narrative that he absolutely cannot abandon. He has staked his entire reputation, or what’s left of it, on the supposition that Barack Obama is a warm, cuddly moderate that is really just looking out for everyone’s best interests. Ignore the radical behind that curtain. So when Obama, predictably by anyone with any remaining functioning brain cells, selects a firm leftist for the Supreme Court, Kmiec merely asserts her moderation. Because that’s the narrative, and he’s sticking to it.
How many bags of silver were thrown at this nitwit anyway?
Kmiec then makes much of her refusal to strike down the Mexico City policy. Kudos to Doug on finding the case that doesn’t make Sotomayor look like a hard leftist, and no doubt this will be a much referenced case in the coming months. And to her credit, she was right. This is the one ray of light that pro-lifers are tenaciously clinging to, and I’m not one to rain on anyone’s parade. But as a Supreme Court Justice she will have a freer hand than as a federal appeal’s court judge. How will she rule on the High Court? That remains to be seen, but for now I will remain skeptical of her supposed moderation on this issue.
Of course Kmiec has to get this dig in at pro-life activists:
But it wouldn’t be a confirmation proceeding unless someone on the right also attempted to make an issue of abortion as well. That’s more than unfortunate given how 99.9 percent of the court’s work has nothing to do with the subject, and given the present stasis of you jurisprudence, even .01 no doubt overstates the likelihood of the Court moving either way on that topic.
He’s not completely wrong here. Abortion is not the only issue, and it is not one that regularly comes before the Court. However, where a prospective Justice falls on something like Roe v. Wade indicates much about that person’s judicial philosophy. Anyone who believes that Roe was rightly decided simply is not fit to be sitting on the Supreme Court. It is doubtful that Sotomayor will express an opinion one way or the other on the case, but I think pro-lifers can be forgiven on focusing on a case that is horribly wrong both from a moral and constitutional standpoint.
President Obama did not select Judge Sotomayor for her judicial outcomes, but for her experience. Referencing Oliver Wendell Holmes and his famous aphorism that the life of the law is not logic but experience, President Obama not surprisingly is admiring of a life that has gone from a single-parent family in a South Bronx housing project to the top of her Cardinal Spellman high school class, Princeton University and Yale Law School.
Ahh, the life story narrative will also be one that will get repeated ad nauseum. Better get used to that.
It’s doubtful that anyone has totally catalogued all of these cases and no doubt they will be flyspecked. Yet, my preliminary review is that this is a woman who cares deeply about justice, both when the facts cry out for it – as in her favorable view of asylum cases of Chinese women who experienced or were threatened with forced birth control, and when the facts do merit special consideration, as when churches and religious associations are trying to maintain their own internal procedures without state interference.
She cares about justice. What an incredibly moving testament to her character. What an amazingly empty load of bull. I’m sure everyone who sits on the bench “cares” about justice to some degree or another. That is an irrelevant observation. What matters is the prospective jurist’s understanding of how to to achieve justice. If a judge believes that it both her duty and right to step outside the boundaries of the written law to achieve a preferred outcome, then she is in fact no lover of justice. Whether Sotomayor is such a person will not likely be found out before she is on the Court for a few years. But it’s something we must endeavor to find out nonetheless. Pity that Kmiec seems thoroughly uninterested in finding out how Sotomayor seeks to achieve Justice. The answer may put President Obama in a bad light, and there is nothing that Doug Kmiec tries harder in this world to avoid than President Obama appearing in a bad light.
Update: Here is a link to the full speech where Sotomayor declared “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Unlike Rod Dreher, I do not think that the full context really makes her point completely inoffensive, though it certainly makes it a bit more palatable. But I’ll let you be the judge.
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6 Comments so far
Damn! I knew sooner or later I’d find myself agreeing, at least partially, with that sheister Kmiec on the Sotomayor nomination.
Kmiec has a point about the pro-life reaction to this pick. It is WAAAAAAAAAY over the top. Furthermore, the mere fact that there are hard-core abortion supporters out there who have big-time doubts about the nominee ought to be a cause for at least some gloating.
And while Kmiec is flat-out lying (surprise, surprise) that Sotomayor is a “moderate”, I don’t see her tacking that much further left than Souter.
The fact is, the pick could’ve been MUCH worse, and I, for one, am glad that Obama has wasted this golden opportunity by instead playing it safe and going with a fairly conventional liberal pick rather than with a hard-core leftist ideologue with the intellectual heft to move the court in her direction.
Let’s play a game: looking at the title of this post, I agree that this was predictable.
So now let’s make some predictions about what Doug Kmiec will do next.
I predict that Prof. Kmiec will defend this nomination through thick and thin, even if evidence surfaces that Judge Sotomayor is rapidly anti-life. Kmiec will only withdraw his support if and when President Obama withdraws his.
I’ve been reading some of her decisions and I admit that I am a bit confused.
On the one hand, she has a decidedly Left-leaning jurisprudence on social affairs. But, on the other hand, she seems to be in line with us “law-and-order” folks.
I am inclined to take her at her word; which is to say that she seems to decide cases based upon her experiences. She seems to be listening to the facts of the cases brought before her and sifting them through her experiences, rather than subjecting them to legal tests such as SCOTUS is want to do.
Assuming my analysis to be correct, what does this say about her decisions on the Court? I don’t know, except to say that it could be really interesting to hear her and Scalia discuss cases. In some ways, I see her as a Left version of Thomas.
Thoughts?
I don’t know that Justice Thomas bases his opinions so much on personal experience. Did you have something else in mind when you made that comparison?
I’m sure Scalia is already licking his chops at engaging in some (friendly) battle with the soon-to-be newest Associate Justice.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I would suggest that parts making up the “full context” on the lecture are designed to make the most offensive part more palatable to people like Rod Dreher who, like him, want to support her.
I can see background being taken into account for the other branches–a legislator might understand what his constituents need based upon shared experiences and a mayor viewed as “the other” during a town crisis can spell disaster. But what does background matter for a judge? Justice is supposed to be blind and strictly looking at only the laws. And, correct me, but aren’t even the facts are settled for cases brought before the SCOTUS?
But what does background matter for a judge?
Not a thing. But then we wouldn’t have the “life story” aspect of this nomination to peddle to make it seem somehow less objectionable.