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So much for the conservatives' desire to paint Sonia Sotomayor as a cold, lonely liberal. The Supreme Court nominee, who has been divorced for decades and never had any children, has been called a "bully" and portrayed as a lonely loser who co-opted her employees as faux family members. But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) opened her confirmation hearing by asking Sotomayor to introduce the family who had accompanied her to the Hart Senate Building. Sotomayor smiled and leaned into the microphone. "If I introduced everybody who's family-like, we would be here all morning," she said warmly, to chuckles from around the room.
Leahy told her to introduce whoever she would like, and Sotomayor introduced her brother, her mother, her mother's husband (whom she smilingly called "my favorite"), a niece and a nephew, by name, then said that the rest of the row behind her was filled with "godchildren and dear friends."
Leahy remarked that at Sotomayor's previous confirmation hearings (this is her third appearance before the Judiciary Committee, because she has previously been confirmed to the district court and the appeals court), Senate marshals were surprised by the number of friends and family members who came to support her. And again today, her entourage helped the judge pull off a nice human start.
Photograph of Sotomayor and her mother by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
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One of the many interesting details in the Washington Post’s bio of Sotomayor yesterday involved her compromise over taking her husband’s name. The weird hybrid she came up with seems to embody all of her ambivalence about love, ethnicity, and being a workaholic woman. She married Kevin Noonan just before law school. He was Irish, and, like many women, she was mindful about losing her identity. (Emily quotes Margaret Mead on that subject here.) So she went with Sotomayor de Noonan, which to me sounds like a countess but was meant to be a nod to the Latin American construction. The result was the preservation of her ethnic identity at the expense of her feminist one. The decision was “not consistent with the feminist movement,” explains Jose Cabranes, one of her mentors. “It means belonging to.” They divorced after a few years.
Her second love story is full of similar poignant ambivalence. She was engaged for eight years to an architect, Peter White. When she was sworn into the 2nd Circuit, she surprised the crowd with a public love poem to him. “The professional success I had before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness,” she said. But that relationship didn’t work out either. White told the Post that she is “extremely dedicated to her work,” and it took up “90 percent” of her time.
Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.
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A small, real moment: At the end of one of the breaks this morning, Sotomayor moved into the witness chair. She looked around and smiled and generally had that air of someone who knows the camera is on her and doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands. She saw a man walk by who she must know, and turned and smiled more widely at him, and looked like she was dying to stand up and say hello. Maybe get a reassuring hug. But he kept going, and her smile froze in place. Oh, the many small awkward indignities of being in the hot seat. May the gates of empathy open for her.
Also, at the risk of being utterly frivolous, Sotomayor looks all the more human today because as far as I can tell, she is the rare woman on TV not protected by a mask of make up. I’m most curious at the moment about whether she addresses the “wise Latina” words straight up in her introduction, or waits to play defense when the senators ask her about it.
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Abortion hasn't dominated the debate in the run-up to Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, but everyone's favorite wedge issue has (briefly) stolen the spotlight today.
Two men wrangled coveted public seats to the hearing, only to be booted when they interrupted Democratic senators by standing up and shouting about abortion.
The first, a sharply-dressed man in his 30s or 40s, jumped in during Sen. Dianne Feinsten's (D-NY) laudatory opening statement with, "Senator, what about the unborn? Abortion is murder!" He got this much out before the Senate police officer standing nearby grabbed him and pulled him outside (it wasn't much of a walk; he was conveniently located within three feet of the door). He wasn't quite out of earshot though, and he managed to yell "Stop the genocide of unborn Latinos!" before the door shut and he was alone with the cops.
It was a little awkward for Feinstein, whose next topic was, unfortunately, Roe v. Wade.
Chairman Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) lecture after the first outburst must not have been stern enough, because about an hour later, another man popped up out of his public seat, shouting "Abortion is murder!" He, too, was shown the door and Leahy gave the crowd another talking-to. After the lunch break, a man and a woman who were already filing out of the public area shouted anit-abortion slogans, one in English, the other in Spanish. Sens. Sessions, Feinstein, Graham, and Coburn went on to reference Roe during their opening statements (and without getting hauled out).
Photograph of an anti-abortion activist praying for Sotomayor in front of the Supreme Court by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
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Sotomayor speaks ... for less time than it takes a senator to clear his throat. I think I’m in the minority here, but I wanted more of her. Why not end the day on a bolder note?
OK, OK, the answer is obvious. This way, the sound bites of the afternoon and evening and on through tomorrow’s early mornings shows are of senators on the attack and Sotomayor soaring above them. She may not be a justice yet, but she is already playing the Olympian card. They were windy and overblown; she was gracious and understated. She started by thanking two of them by name (Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, for introducing her) and then the whole lot of 89 who met with her, and in the process gave an "illuminating tour of the 50 states and invaluable insights into the American people." She gave her mother special huge thanks, and pivoted expertly to how her mother studied alongside the judge and her brother, when they were kids, to become a registered nurse. "We worked hard," Sotomayor emphasized, punching out each word. I heard shades of New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci after his victory before the Supreme Court, when he said, "If you work hard, you can succeed in America, and all of these guys worked hard." Rhetoric ripe for reclaiming. Sotomayor’s sweet-looking, white-haired mother teared up, and who could blame her?
Two other lines that stood out to me (nice and short, ready made for TV and radio):
- "My career as an advocate ended—and my career as a judge began—when I was appointed by President George H.W. Bush." Translation: She stopped pushing a cause when she stopped being a lawyer.
- "In the past month, many Senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy. It is simple: fidelity to the law." No translation needed.
Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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Oh, Norma McCorvey. In 1973, she was Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade. Thirty years later, she became the plaintiff in McCorvey v. Hill, a second lawsuit filed to take back and reverse Roe. And on Monday she was ejected for her anti-abortion protest from the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. Norma McCorvey stands for all the women whom the argument for reproductive freedom has failed to sway. And perhaps, for the limited emotional scope that traditional feminism has allowed for the abortion experience.
McCorvey wrote in her book, Won By Love, that she changed sides on abortion after staring at a fetal development poster. She says she converted to Christianity in 1995, when the director of Operation Rescue baptized her in a swimming pool. She is "Norma McCorvey, Now 100% Pro-Life!" on the web site of Priests for Life, a group devoted to showing women that their abortions were a tragic error that are at the root of all their unhappiness. The path to atonement lies through persuading other women not to make the same mistake. As McCorvey recounted in an interview with Citizen Magazine,
I was just down in Mississippi not long ago, and I learned that a woman who was sitting on a nearby bench was post-abortive, times four. So, I went over there to her and I put my arms around her and I said, “Let me tell you something, sweetie. You know those children who you've lost to abortion?” She said, “Yes.” And I said, “You know that those children are waiting for you … and they're going to welcome you with open arms. They’re going to say, 'Welcome home, mama. We know that you made a mistake and we forgive you.’ ”
She wept a great deal. And I said, “Now let me see a pretty smile on that pretty face” … She said, “Well, I’m just so sorry.” And I said, “We were all deceived.”
You can question the wisdom of this stance, but don’t doubt its sincerity. I wrote about women who are part of McCorvey’s strand of the pro-life movement, and they are a committed, tight group. They say feminists have closed their ears to sad ambivalent responses to abortion, and while they vastly exaggerate the number of women in their camp, they have a point, historically speaking. But they also go a bridge too far, by swearing to the prevalence of "post-abortion syndrome," which claims a link between abortion and mental illness or suicide that’s not supported by credible research. The American Psychological Association criticized anew last summer the studies claiming to show that abortion is bad for women, citing “severe methodological flaws.” Never mind. Norma McCorvey is still showing up to be dragged out of Sotomayor’s hearing, and I’m still getting hate mail from the women who believe her.
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In a new twist to the subplot that abortion has become in Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, it seems that the woman who was arrested for shouting down a Democratic senator during Monday's proceedings was "Roe" herself. Or, more accurately, Norma McCorvey, the woman whose abortion-rights lawsuit in the '70s led to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. After becoming the face of the fight for abortion rights, McCorvey later reversed her stance and began campaigning against abortion. She apparently took that campaign back to the Supreme Court (sort of) on Monday. The Washington Post is reporting that Capitol police arrested McCorvey after she shouted at Sotomayor on her way out of the chamber. "You're wrong about abortion, Sotomayor!" she yelled. Her voice broke a little but she repeated "You're wrong!" before she rushed out of the room.
Even before we knew who she was, McCorvey's outburst felt different than the ones that preceded it. The two men who had already been dragged out of the chambers for similar infractions were very calculated in their actions—they stood up straight, they shouted loudly, but they responded rather amiably to the grip of police officers on their arms. They were there to get arrested. But McCorvey, who seemed to want to say something but also to want to get out the door, was there to deliver a message.
Photograph of Norman McCorvey by Travis Lindquist/Getty Images.
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I’m feeling deflated this morning. For many decades, the legal academy (and to some degree, even the rest of the universe) has been debating the degree to which law is a scientific abstraction—a computer you crank up that spits out the right answer—and the degree to which it is malleable, subjective: a piece of clay that judges necessarily shape. At times, legal realism, as the second position is called, has gone too far. But mostly it’s a hugely welcome breath of fresh air, a way of articulating what everyone intuitively understands. Judges are not robots! They are not, in fact, umpires who just call balls and strikes, to give in to John Roberts’ now all-pervasive sports metaphor, because sometimes they have to determine the size and all the other parameters of the strike zone.
But now we have Sonia Sotomayor going along with and indeed promoting a view of the law as all about Input automatically dictating Output. As she keeps putting it, in this or some other variation, “I’m a judge who believes the facts drive the law. By drive the law, I mean, determines how the law will apply in that individual case.” Sometimes, it is true that the facts of a case matter for interpreting a statute or a prior court ruling. But often, there is play in the joints, room for disagreement, reason that smart and yes, even wise judges reach different conclusions. Sotomayor’s formulation ignores all of that reality. It frames cases as marching inexorably to one right answer. It’s the Dragnet version of juding: “Just the facts and the law, ma’am.”
I know, I know: Sotomayor is repeating this mantra to distance herself from all her past statements about how life experience and background do matter to the work of judging. Those statements are complicated and subtle. They might lead her down tricky paths today. And so into the attic of the past they go. Sen. Jeff Sessions rightly points out to Sotomayor, "Your philosophy is much more likely to reach full flower if you sit on the high court than on the lower court, where you are subject to review." Sotomayor is giving us her version of Roberts’ simplistic, misleading umpire metaphor: A meaningless safety zone to retreat to whenever a question could take her anywhere interesting. I guess this is what it takes to become a Supreme Court justice. But no wonder my colleagues are sending depressed notes about how Obama might as well nominate a computer next.
Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Staff/Getty Images.
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Emily, I agree that even though Sonia Sotomayor declared early on her first day of questioning that "humans aren't robots," she's kind of acting like one. She speaks thoughtfully, but it looks like that's because she decided a long time ago what she was going to say. Her measured responses to her critics' questions remind me of the "witnesses" in high school mock trials. The teenage attorneys (and I know, because I was one) aren't bound by rules about not feeding answers to their witnesses, so feed they do. They type detailed lists of questions and their required answers, coach their witnesses on tone of voice and demeanor, and explain how the opposing attorneys will try to trap them during cross-examination. Sotomayor, who has been rehearsing extensively with White House staffers during the past few weeks, looks and sounds like those mock witnesses this morning. She knew what she would be asked, and she had a scripted, unrevealing response at the ready. The prize goes to the senator who somehow jogs her out of this.
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I prefer Sotomayor’s effort to put her wise Latina point in context to the talking points the Obama administration previously came up with. To be sure, she's not clearing up the internal contradiction between the unobjectionable idea that “life experiences matter” and her hope that being a wise Latina would lead “more often than not” to “better conclusions.” And in his exchange with Sotomayor this afternoon, Sen. Kyl gave her speech a fair and more complex reading than she’s allowing for. But Sotomayor did explain this morning that she gave that speech “most often to groups of women lawyers or most particularly young Latino lawyers and students. As my speech made clear ... I was trying to inspire them to believe that their life experiences would enrich the legal system.” In response to Kyl, she added that she often told her listeners at the end of the speech, “I hope someday you’re sitting on the bench with me.”
In an insightful piece for Slate, Monica Youn pointed out that black and Hispanic and Asian heavyweights often get tangled up in identity politics because as “minority role models,” they “are regularly asked to put on the public record—at lunches, award ceremonies, community events—lengthy statements of their views on America's most explosive topic: race.” White men aren’t asked to explain how being white and male affects them as judges or leaders, so there’s no rope to hang them with. What do you think: Is this take-two from Sotomayor convincing or no?
