Sotomayor and Republican Choices

 

 

President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court shows the president at his most gracious towards the Republicans who bedevil him, giving them a choice and a voice in one of a President’s most enduring decisions.

 

Sure, the choice is like that 20 states give condemned inmates facing execution, allowing them a say in method, not outcome. Hey, it’s a choice, right?

 

And if the voice Senate Republicans get is the kind heard after a warden says “Any last words?”  they still can’t claim being denied a voice.

 

Senate Republicans trying to resist a growing urge to lie down in front of any steamroller they see have limited options in opposing Sotomayor, all of them bad.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s female. Of course, they wouldn’t say so explicitly, but the party’s Cheney/Limbaugh base, which can only see women in either nighties or cooking aprons, would understand and approve.

 

Women voters, of course, might see it differently. In the 2008 presidential election, Republicans lost unmarried women by a 70-29 margin. And they lost women overall 56-43. Opposing the nominee because she’s female would certainly build on that record.

 

Republican can oppose Sotomayor because she’s Hispanic. In a 2001 lecture, she is reported to have said “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.”

 

“Racist!” yells the Republican core, which admittedly ought to know, but is wrong on this one. If the idea, as it says on the Supreme Court building, is “Equal Justice Under Law,” than those dispensing justice must at least in some way connect with those judged – and with the likely real-world consequences of their decisions.  That won’t wash with the Republican core, which is made nervous by census data showing Hispanics account for more than 15 percent of the U.S. population, and downright jittery when they look at the 2008 results with Democrats taking Hispanics 67-31. If Republicans seek even more distance from the Hispanic electorate, opposing Sotomayor is the ticket.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s liberal. Of all the grounds for opposition, this is the least odious. It chucks a scrap to the snarling core that that bays attack when it sniffs the L-word, and at least  spritzes GOP Senators with Eau De Principle. But the record of Supreme Court justices voting the way folks who nominated and confirmed them thought they would isn’t good. Soon to-be-retired Justice David Souter, who was supposed to be a safe and solid conservative appointee of President Bush I, ended his career as a mostly liberal vote on the court. This course won’t cause more self-inflicted Republican damage, but it won’t gain any converts, either.

 

Prediction: Republicans will oppose Sotomayor because she’s a female Hispanic liberal. With a sure instinct to find the worst of all possible outcomes in any recent political situation, the Republican party will manage to offend all possible new constituents while catering to a core that sees Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney as the rising young hopes of tomorrow.

 

If the post-Sotomayor confirmation Republicans are offered a last meal, they shouldn’t be surprised if it’s crow.

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Weekend Tids and Bits

 

RULE, MS. BRITANNIA! After 341 years of the job’s existence, beginning with John Dryden, Britain finally appointed a woman as Poet Laureate. Carol Ann Duffy, 53, told the BBC that she decided to accept the offered position “purely because they hadn’t had a woman.” The term of the job runs ten years, which should give Great Britain enough time to collect its wits after such a hasty plunge into modern practice.

 

EGYPT FOLLOWS RAHM’S ADVICE right out the window. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, has been widely quoted as saying “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” So Egypt, an overwhelmingly pork-avoiding Muslin nation, is responding to the swine flu crisis by slaughtering all the 300,000 or so pigs owned and eaten by the nation’s minority Coptic Christians. See, that way it’s not state-sanctioned oppression of a minority, it’s just sound public health.

 

NOT TONIGHT, DEAR – THE COALITION GOVERNMENT WRANGLING GIVES ME A HEADACHE is the refrain from women in Kenya, says CNN. They’re withholding their favors for a week to protest political divisiveness. CNN did not report what the millions of married women elsewhere in the world were protesting.

 

AL-QAIDA USED HOTMAIL to communicate following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and plotted the location of other possible targets in an almanac, the AP reports, citing a guilty plea agreement. Seems the bad guys had a problem with a similar attempt on Yahoo. Although both Microsoft and Yahoo are locked in a struggle for e-mail El Supremo, neither marketing department seems to have recognized the presented opportunity.

 

THE MEASURED, CALM SWINE FLU REPORTING of the last week caused tremendous runs on dust masks around the globe, even though the number of confirmed deaths is ten – nine in Mexico and one in the United States. So far there have been no reports of an upsurge in personal lightning protection sales, even though the National Weather Service says lightning kills and average of 62 Americans every year. Clearly another case of press bias.

 

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE chairman Michael Steele says of the coming David Souter Supreme Court vacancy that “the president should take his time and search for a nominee whose legal views are consistent with and reflective of mainstream America.” It’s the first known instance of a major U.S. political party taking its membership out of Supreme Court consideration.

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