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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
When a pack of smartly-uniformed firefighters strode out of Sonia
Sotomayor's confirmation hearing Thursday, they were greeted by a
throng of reporters—and six girls in green t-shirts, their
point-and-shoots at the ready. The members of Greater King David
Baptist Church's Girl Scout troop had just listened to two of the
firefighters testify, and now they crowded together, photographing the
firemen as they walked by. This was the best day of their trip. (Read more in Double X.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
If Sen. Jeff Sessions' 20 minutes with Sonia Sotomayor this afternoon is
any indication, Republicans feel a new urgency in this second (and
final) round of questioning. Before he began, Sessions' aides
distributed 70-page packets of highlighted, tabbed documents regarding
Sotomayor's tenure with the Puerto Rico Education and Legal Defense
Fund. When his turn came, Sessions dispensed with the usual niceties
about how well the nominee is holding up and jumped right in, accusing
Sotomayor of promoting the idea that judges' "backgrounds, sympathies,
and prejudices" should and do affect judicial decisions ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Of all the stylistically tone-deaf things Sen. Lindsey Graham said to
Sonia Sotomayor Tuesday, the worst was his declaration that he was
going to tell a 55-year-old judge with 18 years of appellate experience
how the world works ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just
another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack
Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam
Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did
current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An
Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito
wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as
Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its
nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back,
are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech
sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the
value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench.
Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next
question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who
clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the
Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:
As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve
judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise
white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and,
more importantly, almost certainly true.
Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Yale law professor Heather Gerken:
Over the last day, I’ve been fielding calls from
reporters, members of your tribe, many of whom have asked some
variation on the following questions: “What role does identity politics
play on the Supreme Court, and should those who support civil-rights
causes be happy about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination?” (This, for what
it’s worth, is almost a direct quote).
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There is only one sensible answer to such questions. Please stop.
Honestly. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this, but let me spell
it out... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh just called
Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor "reverse racists." He is referring to
the controversy over Sotomayor's line, from a speech given in 2002,
that she believed a Latina woman would make a better decision than a
white man. Limbaugh might have ground to stand on had Sotomayor been
making a blanket reference to the inherent superiority of Latina women
to white men. But she wasn't. As Hanna pointed out yesterday,
Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, about which there
is evidence that having female judges leads to outcomes that appear to
be fairer for women. She was not being a reverse racist; she was being
a pragmatist, and perhaps, a wee bit of an activist in that moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sam, I had the exact opposite reaction to Sotomayor’s claims of ordinariness
yesterday. My thought was, “How refreshing. Instead of making multiple
earnest claims about her vast personal humility, here we finally have a
nominee who actually is humble.” Or at least appreciates that she
didn’t make it this far on her own steam... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, Hanna: To me, Sotomayor's speech
is most interesting for its embrace of a way of thinking about identity
politics that seems almost mystical in nature: She stresses the
experiential over the rational. In beginning the speech with
descriptions of the Puerto Rican food she loves, she emphasizes the
ways in which we're the products of hundreds of years of culture and
genetics; she lavishes attention on a particular "Puerto Rican" way of
loving and living to suggest how old and deep our identities are. This
is identity politics, yes, but it's bound up with a sensual, visceral
sense of the texture of life that I don't usually hear in the language
of judges... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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