That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, published last week while I was out on vacation. I contrast the 31 Republican votes against Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination with the mere 3 negative votes that Ruth Bader Ginsburg received 16 years earlier. “The big lesson from the Sotomayor vote,” I explain, “is that most Republicans were now fighting Supreme Court nominations on the ground of judicial philosophy” rather than invoking the deference approach.”
I also toss in a few nuggets that I wasn’t able to work into my previous posts on the Sotomayor nomination:
- Sotomayor’s strange belief that there are no adjectives in Spanish.
- Sotomayor’s quota mentality for judgeships.
- Sotomayor’s celebration of the “importance of indefiniteness in the law.”
- The White House’s scramble, immediately after Obama announced that he had picked Sotomayor, to assure abortion supporters that she was a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade.
- Sotomayor’s past as a Puerto Rican nationalist and her later support for (in the words of one critic) an “affirmative action plan for Puerto Rico” statehood.
- Sotomayor’s revelation, in her written responses to post-hearing questions, that her testimony that judges must “not make the law” was meaningless wordplay.
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