The Political Whore

Here’s a quick look at how the media — professional and otherwise — are treating this morning’s announcement of District Court of Appeal Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina to be nominated to the highest court in the land.

[UPDATE: after the jump, I've added the Libertarian Party's blistering assessment of Sotomayor as an activist judge.]

HuffPo says it guarantees a dramatic storyline:

As it happens, criticism of Sotomayor had already begun in earnest. Jeffrey Rosen’s New Republic article, filled with anonymous sources, cropped quotes, and an admitted unwillingness to do much more beyond lightweight legal analysis, formed the Ur-text from which the first wave of criticism sprung. To wit: Sotomayor was a not-smart person who nevertheless went to Princeton, and a hotheaded Latina whose ethnic hotheadedness seemingly carried none of the accepted, value-added ethnic hotheadedness of Antonin Scalia. Everyone went a little crazy after that was written, with the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder making the lunatic assertion that spitting the innuendo’s of unnamed axe-grinders was the model of “respectable intellectual” centrism, and Mark Halperin idiotically worrying about what would happen to white people.

The Fix says it is a good poiltical move:

In picking Sotomayor then, Obama has almost certainly solidified his standing among Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group and an increasingly influential part of any national candidate’s electoral calculus.

Republican strategists have fretted openly that if their party can’t find a way to make Hispanics a swing group electorally — as President George W. Bush did in 2004 when he won 44 percent of the Latino vote — they may find themselves in a permanent minority status. Bridging that gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community just got a lot more difficult.

FiveThirtyEight.com says current senators still in place voted in 1998 to confirm Sotomayor to the lower bench by a 35-11 margin.

Here is Fox News’ bio of Judge Sotomayor. Here is its take on her First Amendment record:

As a district judge, Sotomayor advanced First Amendment religious claims by tossing out a state prison rule banning members of a religious sect from wearing colored beads to ward off evil spirits, and by rejecting a suburban law preventing the display of a 9-foot-high menorah in a park.

Andrew Sullivan says the jury is still out on Sotomayor’s stance on executive power:

To my mind, this is the most significant issue for the court, especially given the radicalism of Roberts and Alito on presidential supremacy. Charlie Savage did an article yesterday about potential nominees’ views on executive authority. This is his only mention of Obama’s pick:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — has never worked in the federal executive branch and sits on a court that hears few executive power cases.

Here are the White House’s talking points, circulated to friendlies and congressional supporters.

And the Libertarian Party is unhappy, unsurprisingly, calling Sotomayor an “activist:”

“While Judge Sotomayor deserves a fair and impartial hearing, Supreme Court justices should be nominated for their thorough knowledge of and adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law,” said William Redpath, Libertarian National Committee Chairman.

“By nominating Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama has made it clear he prefers an activist for his personal causes over a rational interpreter of law,” said Redpath.

According to Cato Institute Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon, Sotomayor is “the most radical of all the frequently mentioned candidates before him.”

Sotomayor is best known for the Ricci v. DeStafano case, in which the New Haven, Conn. fire department decided it didn’t like the results of an officers promotion exam in which whites and Hispanic firefighters outperformed black firefighters.  The city threw out the results of the exam, denying several firefighters promotions solely because of their race.  The firefighters sued the city, claiming racial discrimination under Title VVI of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Cato Institute, Reason Foundation and the Individual Rights Foundations filed briefs on behalf of the firefighters, citing the absurdity of allowing public employers to throw out the results of valid, race-neutral exams that produce racial disparity because the racial disparity produced wasn’t politically correct.  The firefighters and the libertarian foundations filing briefs argued that public employment practices should be color-blind.

Sotomayor disagreed, ruling the city has a right to discriminate against white and Hispanic public employees to construct a politically correct racial mix in hiring, even if it goes against the results of a racially-neutral competency exam.

The case is now before the Supreme Court.

Here’s the video of Sotomayor being presented to the media by President Barack Obama:

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