Bloodthirsty Liberal

When liberal columnists in the Washington Post call BS, President Obama, that’s probably what you’re spewing:

Nice try, Mr. President, but I’m not buying the poor-choice-of-words defense for Sonia Sotomayor. “I’m sure she would have restated it,” President Obama told NBC News about his Supreme Court nominee’s now-famous 32 words: “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.” Said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, “I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor.”

You spin the speech that’s dealt you. But it seems clear to me that Sotomayor, to quote that great jurist Dr. Seuss, meant what she said and said what she meant. This was no throwaway line or off-the-cuff linguistic stumble along the lines of the judge’s other controversial comment about appeals courts making policy.

Rather, Sotomayor was deliberately and directly disputing remarks by then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that a wise old woman and a wise old man would eventually reach the same conclusion in a case. “I am…not so sure that I agree with the statement,” Sotomayor said. Moreover, if Sotomayor regretted that YouTube moment, she had the chance to revise and extend: Her remarks were reprinted in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal. Knowing the multi-layered editing process of law journals, I’d be shocked if Sotomayor did not at least have the chance to review the transcript of her speech and make any tweaks.

Sonia from the Bronx will get her own chance to explain herself in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I’m sure will entertain us all. It’s beyond dispute that Obama picked her because of this belief, not in spite of it.

But if I were on the committee, I’d ask her about her boss’s judicial philosophy. What does she think of re-writing the Constitution to address what the “government must do on your behalf”? Does she agree that the Warren Court (or any court) should “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution”? What in her view is “redistributive change”, and is it the role of the courts to bring it about?

Make the hearings more than a referendum on So-So. Rather put Obama’s entire radical judicial and social agenda in the dock, and cross examine the hell out of it. I think Americans would be appalled to learn the truth.