I’ve already discussed the silly efforts of Judge Sotomayor’s defenders to claim that she “misspoke” and was “unscripted” when she said in 2001, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” As I’ve pointed out, that comment was from the prepared text of a speech that Sotomayor then published as a law-review article.

Now it turns out that Sotomayor made substantially similar comments in a 1994 speech, a speech that was part of the Senate record on her Second Circuit confirmation in 1998. Somehow the blogger who reports this news thinks it’s significant not because it further refutes the White House’s defense of Sotomayor’s comment but because it supposedly raises the question why Republicans didn’t object to this comment in 1998.

Applying Occam’s razor, I’d speculate that the answer to that question is that the staffer who reviewed Sotomayor’s speeches at the time missed the comment. While unfortunate, that would hardly be surprising, especially in light of the much lower level of resources devoted to an appellate confirmation.

(I’ll also note that the sentence at issue in the 1994 speech—“I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion”—doesn’t itself state “better” than whom. The reader has to look four sentences earlier to understand that Sotomayor is comparing a “wise woman” to a “wise man.” Someone skimming the speech might easily miss that.)

In any event, the strong reaction that Sotomayor’s 2001 comment has elicited renders desperate any suggestion that Republicans are somehow estopped from objecting to it because of their failure in 1998 to object to a similar comment she made in 1994.