This morning, President Obama made his first Supreme Court appointment, and he chosen Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She was considered one of the lead candidates, if not the lead candidate, to replace Justice David Souter. Before we get into some of the commentary from around the web, the news of the appointment via the New York Times:
President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House.
If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.
Notice the emphasis on race and the emphasis on sex, because a lot of the criticism thusfar is that the President is playing identity politics with this Supreme Court pick. Moderate-Conservative David Frum, who has thusfar been not the most firebrand critic of Barack Obama, said outright that the President did not pick someone based on their legal experience, but rather on what the pick does for appealing to demographics. Sotomayor has a record of supporting an activist Liberal court, and in a video that surfaced she is shown saying that the Court of Appeals is "where policy is made", though she quickly backs off the statement realizing she is on camera:
<center>
</center>
No statement could really personify judicial activism (as opposed to ruling by the Constitution) than a statement that says a court makes policy. Her immediate reaction to take two steps backwards from the statement shows she understands the political reality of holding that position, but even then she ends up chuckling and babbling and essentially saying that the courts make law in practice. Reading the Liberal magazine The New Republic, some other issues have been raised about Sotomayor:
Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.
The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue."
The article goes on to mention a time when a colleague had to tell her to stop talking so that the person trying the case before the court could talk. On the other side of the spectrum from TNR, the Heritage Foundation has set up an excellent page which has rapid response information about the Sotomayor pick. The page is a great resource as hearings and undoubtedly media scrutiny will unfold. Finally, to end this post with a bit of a bite, I want to share with you a Twitter update from La Shawn Barber cutting into the heart of painful identity politics and judicial activism on the Left:
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomeyer, like most liberals, supports lowered standards for blacks. Thanks, Obama. You're a great American.