Hanna, I agree with you about the unfortunate trend of senators opposing perfectly qualified nominees for the Supreme Court, cabinet posts, etc, just because they are from the opposite party. As Republican Kit Bond said in announcing his support of Sotomayor, "Elections have consequences." And when your party loses an election, you should extend the courtesy of approving the people the president chooses except in the cases in which the person clearly doesn't meet the standards for the job. However, Senator Obama himself was part of this partisan creep. You'd be hard pressed to say that John Roberts and Samuel Alito were not qualified for the Supreme Court, yet Obama voted against both of them because he didn't like their philosophies. So it's dispiriting, but no surprise that President Obama's excellent Supreme Court nominee was voted down by a majority of Republicans.

Photograph of Barack Obama by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: Sotomayor confirmation

Senate decorum is made for “historic moments,” and there was much of it on display in the vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court Justice: the wooden benches, Robert Byrd being wheeled out of the hospital for this special occasion. But none of it could cover up the very modern and petty reality of the partisan split. Only nine Republicans voted for her. Compare that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, only 16 years ago, was confirmed by a 96-3 vote. Even Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and keeper of the bipartisan peace, declined, for the first time, to confirm a Supreme Court justice. Sotomayor spent her entire confirmation hearing distancing herself from President Obama’s “empathy” standard. The Republicans are desperate to win over Latinos. And still, neither of those incentives trumped the apparently urgent need to crush the opposing team.

Photograph of Sen. Jeff Sessions (AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT), by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: Sotomayor confirmation

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor this morning almost entirely along partisan lines—13 to 6, with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican in favor. Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. She made it through her hearings without the “meltdown” that Graham said would be needed to stop her confirmation, and also without giving Republicans any additional ammunition to oppose her. Yet today’s "no" voters included John Cornyn of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and so presumably thinks about the long-term national health of his party, and comes from a state that is 36 percent Hispanic, and Jon Kyl of Arizona, which is almost 30 percent Hispanic. The GOP stance leaves the party without an answer to this headline in Politico: “Democrats have huge day with Hispanics.”

Why don’t the Republicans seem to care? Three reasons: They are playing to their base. Or, ideological doubts about a future justice increasingly are viewed as a legitimate reason to vote no on both sides of the aisle. And a third, wild-card possibility: The Sotomayor nomination hasn’t captured the nation’s imagination the way the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. did last week. And so Republicans decided, rightly or wrongly, that they could oppose her without self-destructing.

With a handful of exceptions so far, Republicans are opposing Sotomayor despite poll numbers showing that 58 percent of Americans polled last week said Sotomayor should be confirmed, including 40 percent of conservatives, 60 percent of independents, and 65 percent of moderates. The key number for the Republican committee members, apparently, was that only 28 percent of Republicans supported her, with 57 percent opposed—up 14 points from the month before the hearings. “I don’t think Hispanics were his intended audience,” said Brent Wilkes, executive director of the Hispanic organization LULAC, about Cornyn’s "no" vote.

You could hear the ideological rumble against Sotomayor in nearly every Republican statement today. Sen. Jeff Sessions launched the GOP criticism by citing Sotomayor’s ruling against the white New Haven firefighters who sued the city for reverse discrimination, and by attacking her record in gun cases. “I think she got the constitution wrong,” he said of one of her Second Amendment rulings. “She gave short shift to fundamental constitutional rights,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah piled on. Some Democrats—most famously Barack Obama—voted against Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito based on the same philosophy of opposition. Less deference to the president, and more attention to how judges are likely to rule when they get to the high bench. Sen. Charles Schumer smoked out “judging by ideology” back in 2001 and tried to articulate a standard for it.

Today only Lindsey Graham of South Carolina harked back to a previous era of usually honoring a president’s selection. “I am deciding to vote for a woman I would not have chosen,” Graham said, citing Sotomayor’s well qualified rating from the American Bar Association and praising her character. “When I went back to what we used to do around here,” Graham said, he decided to support a future justice who he saw as to the left but “in the mainstream.” He warned against setting a standard “where people aspiring to be a judge ... will never take on a cause”—a nervousness that law students thinking about their future aspirations are already expressing.

From the moment Sotomayor was chosen, she and the White House have assiduously followed a script designed to usher her through with as little controversy as possible. If there was a spontaneous moment in the entire choreographed ritual, I missed it. This was supposed to get her confirmed with as many votes as possible. The White House talked about clearing 70. Now that looks unlikely. From which you might conclude that a script can take you only so far. Or that in this Congress, a moderate pick for the Court will fare only marginally better, votes-wise, than an overtly liberal one.

The Gates arrest, on the other hand, was the opposite of scripted. It’s been all about improvisation, for better or worse, from the moment Sergeant James Crowley knocked on Gates’ Cambridge door through Obama’s initial comments last Wednesday, when he said the police had “acted stupidly” in making the arrest. And so we’re all talking about it, debating what happened and what if anything the incident says about race relations. And we're trying on multiple lens of analysis: The power of the police. The privilege of a Harvard professor, whatever his race. The tendency of law enforcement to presume the guilt of black men. The hoary legal principle that a man’s home is his castle. They all come into play. And they're far more riveting than the strait jacket of a confirmation process we’ve boxed ourselves into.

Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Karen Blier/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: john cornyn, jon kyl, lindsey graham, Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court

A guest post from Yale law student Adam Chandler:

Senator Lindsey Graham had a flash of regret at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings on Monday: “The one thing I'm worried about is that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to deter people from speaking their mind. I don't want milquetoast judges.” Based on my experience of college and law school, it might be too late.

Yes, Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed, and the lesson of her victory is clear: Play it safe. Say nothing, and join nothing, within a pole’s length of controversy. Be like John Roberts, whose life and career path was described as a Boys’ Life “Guide to Becoming a Supreme Court Justice.” He was able to ascribe his controversial writings to others: Chief Justice Rehnquist, for whom he clerked, and the Reagan administration, in which he served. Finally, choose your thesis topics with care: The senior theses of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Ben Bernanke have been dissected by opponents and the media, as has Judge Sotomayor’s note in the Yale Law Journal.

For students who aspire to the bench or other high posts, the lesson plays out in disheartening ways. In my undergraduate constitutional law course at Duke, my professor laid out six lines of argument that could have been used to decide Roe v. Wade and polled the class to see which we found most plausible. At the time, I chuckled to see a couple of “gunners” squirm, hoping no one noticed them keeping their hands down in fear of taking a public position on The Issue. I have seen presidential-hopefuls refuse to contribute to an Internet travelogue on a sponsored trip to the Middle East. I know law students who shied away from writing on abortion, and others who were nervous about signing up for ideological student groups, uncertain what their membership might mean for them in the future. I even read a perfectly innocuous blog post about the writings of several law school classmates that ended with a disclaimer: If anyone mentioned in the post wanted to “clear it from their record,” it would be taken down. And I have not been immune: Friends told me I was crazy for wanting to write my masters thesis on affirmative action; I wrote it on undergraduate sleeplessness instead.

Such is the chilling effect of the intense personal scrutiny our nominees endure. Judge Sotomayor’s job on the Supreme Court will be to wrestle with—and take a stand on—many of the most difficult and controversial issues of the day. Wouldn’t it be nice if tomorrow’s leaders had experience doing that before they join her in Washington?

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

When a pack of smartly-uniformed firefighters strode out of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing Thursday, they were greeted by a throng of reporters—and six girls in green t-shirts, their point-and-shoots at the ready. The members of Greater King David Baptist Church's Girl Scout troop had just listened to two of the firefighters testify, and now they crowded together, photographing the firemen as they walked by. This was the best day of their trip.

The girls paid their way from Baton Rouge to Washington selling Girl Scout cookies (their chapter is in the Cookie Hall of Fame) to learn something about how government works. On Thursday, they met La. Sen. Mary Landrieu and then filed into Sotomayor's hearing. The nominee herself was already gone; she had finished testifying earlier and been replaced by a slate of outside witnesses. But the girls and their chaperones were still interested. They've been following the hearing on T.V. and the radio for the last four days, and they paid close attention to the Ricci v. DeStefano case.

Never mind that the part of the hearing they watched involved the plaintiffs in a case they thought was without merit. They were just glad to be part of the process. "This is history," troop leader Virginia Castle said. "We are sitting in on history." The girls said they hadn't been forced to come to the hearing of the nominee who could become the first Hispanic and the third woman to sit on the Supreme Court—they wanted to. Two of the six want to be lawyers, and they said they'd learned something about what it might take to make it to the top of the judiciary someday. "I learned color doesn't matter," Katelyn said. "And the Senate is really important."

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

Sen. Lindsey Graham has had many patronizing moments during the Sotomayor hearings, and I've been cutting him a break because the substance of his questions has been interesting even if the tone has been off. But this afternoon he got to me. Graham spent much of the day making the point that discrimination against minorities is a real problem. Good. I was rooting for him, too, when he cut off Linda Chavez's attack on Sotomayor with, "Let’s make sure everyone in the country knows we aren’t just a party of short white guys." But then he went after his own real-person, New Haven firefighter witnesses. He started by lecturing Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who is the named plaintiff in the case the Republicans have been bashing Sotomayor with all week, about how the country is one generation away from discrimination and ended with, "I hope you don't forget that." This is a seriously misplaced bit of lecturing. And then, worse, he asked Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic among the firefighters who sued, if people had called him an Uncle Tom. Vargas murmured yes. Graham switched to, "I think you've done a lot for America and the Hispanic community." If that was his message, why did he make Vargas go down the self-shaming path? If these were experienced Washington player kind of witnesses, that would be one thing. But these guys will probably never be in the spotlight again. They don't need their own side wrecking the moment.

Photograph of Frank Ricci and Ben Vargas by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: ben vargas, frank ricci, lindsey graham, Sonia Sotomayor

If Sen. Jeff Sessions' 20 minutes with Sonia Sotomayor this afternoon is any indication, Republicans feel a new urgency in this second (and final) round of questioning. Before he began, Sessions' aides distributed 70-page packets of highlighted, tabbed documents regarding Sotomayor's tenure with the Puerto Rico Education and Legal Defense Fund. When his turn came, Sessions dispensed with the usual niceties about how well the nominee is holding up and jumped right in, accusing Sotomayor of promoting the idea that judges' "backgrounds, sympathies, and prejudices" should and do affect judicial decisions. When she tried to rebut that characterization of her comments (Sessions had dragged out the "wise Latina" remark yet again), Sessions tersely disagreed with her, then moved on to the Second Amendment without pause.

Yesterday, Sotomayor and the senators (Democrats and Republicans alike) couldn't apologize fast enough when they even appeared to be interrupting. Today, Sessions cut Sotomayor off several times, asking stoccato questions and blazing through the "wise Latina" remark, the Second Amendment, abortion, international law, and Sotomayor's role with PRELDF. And yet with just 100 minutes of Republican questioning left, Sotomayor is showing no susceptibility to the "meltdown" that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said would be necessary to derail her confirmation.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

Of all the stylistically tone-deaf things Sen. Lindsey Graham said to Sonia Sotomayor Tuesday, the worst was his declaration that he was going to tell a 55-year-old judge with 18 years of appellate experience how the world works. "I need to be sure that you understand the world as it really is," he said before launching into a lecture about how a comment analogous to her much-maligned "wise Latina" remark would have ended his career. Graham sounded truly aggrieved: "I just hope you will appreciate the world in which we live in, that you can say those things ... and still have a chance to get on the Supreme Court. Others could not remotely come close to that statement and survive. Does that make sense to you?"

Graham wasn't telling Sotomayor how the world works; he was telling her how his world works. But he conflated the two, making a statement about the standards set for his demographic-white males-out to be an assertion about the nature of the universe. Pretty rich, considering this hearing is supposed to be all about empathy.

Photograph of Lindsey Graham by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

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?

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court, wise latina speech

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.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges