The Sotomayor walk back is a bad idea.

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You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back, are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench. Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding: OK, so if her word choice was poor, does she still believe in the idea she was expressing?

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges; diversity, Supreme Court

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Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

Comments

تحميل برامج تحميل برنامج

By: beckham_250 | Sun, 09/20/2009 - 07:14

تحميل برامج تحميل برنامج تحميل برامج نوكيا برامج
تحميل ماسنجر تحميل موبايل موقع دليل مواقع

And if she does?

By: KJ Dell Antonia | Sat, 05/30/2009 - 20:36

What if she does think a Latina female has better judgment than a white male? I've yet to get the relevance of this. Certainly it would be politically incorrect to put it the other way around, and any judicial candidate who believed that a white male had better judgement than a Latina female would do best to keep that to himself, but in the end, this is just one of those things that people say. In effect, she's saying that yes, I have good judgement. As good as a white male? Hell, yes. Better, even. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

More interesting is her comment that appellate courts are where policy is made. Now, I think that's pretty true, and necessarily so. The things that come before appellate courts are often matters in which the law is unclear, and the interpretation can and often does involve effectively making policy. That said, to put it in those words seems to me like exactly the kind of thing a stronger Republican party could have seized on and really used. Instead, it's clear that they're focusing on comments that are easier to understand for the layman--not with the real goal of Borking her nomination, but in order to energize one of the less appealing elements of the Republican base.

I'm having trouble getting really excited about this nomination, though. I think she'll be fine, but I'm not loving her.

Hmmm, well that's a question.

By: Sihaya | Fri, 05/29/2009 - 20:01

If her word choice was poor, do we know what idea she was expressing?

What About Sotomayor's Underlying Sentiment?

Comments

تحميل برامج تحميل برنامج

By: beckham_250 | Sun, 09/20/2009 - 07:14

And if she does?

By: KJ Dell Antonia | Sat, 05/30/2009 - 20:36

Hmmm, well that's a question.

By: Sihaya | Fri, 05/29/2009 - 20:01

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