Out of Sessions

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, announces that he will vote against Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. This development hardly comes as a surprise. Sessions's opposition was nearly as predictable as Sotomayor's confirmation in the Senate, where Democrats hold a 60-40 majority. What is curious about Sessions' decision is its peculiar logic in arriving at the decision. On the one hand, he warns that liberals might have nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory because Sotomayor retreated from previous positions. But on the other hand, he turned around and said that, in the final analysis, she would be unable to resist the urge for judicial activism that liberals cherish.

Affirmative Action

Not surprisingly, the congenitally demagogic Pat Buchanan disparages Sonia Sotomayor as the "affirmative action candidate." But Howard Ross, a diversity consultant, places Buchanan's statement in its proper historical context. Since the founding of the Republic, he says, there have been 110 nominees to the United States Supreme Court, 106 of them were white males nominated exclusively by white males (presidents), which were in turn confirmed by a body of predominantly white males (Senate). Affirmative action indeed.

Sotomayor's Critics

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow weighs in, and quite effectively, on the charges of Sonia Sotomayor's racism emanating from the guiding lights of the Republican Party - Gingrich, Limbaugh and Tancredo:

Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!

The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”

This is rich.