J.C. Arenas on the laundry list of qualifications for Obama’s Supreme Court picks:

Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment was Sonia Sotomayor, the Bronx-bred daughter of Puerto Rican parents, who supposedly was a valedictorian student with a deficiency in English and become an Ivy-League educated jurist credited with saving Major League Baseball.

Now we have Elena Kagan, the granddaughter of immigrants, who as Dean of Harvard Law, introduced the concepts of civil debate, a faculty lounge, free coffee and tampons.

If this woman has some legitimate qualifications to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, I hope they are presented soon; otherwise I’m going to have a win a year supply of Laffy Taffy to find a bigger joke.

The word “mediocrity” springs to mind.  So does the story Harrison Bergeron.

It was a foregone conclusion, but it’s still irksome that the RINOs piled on for Sotomayor.  It’s not just that she’s a judicial activist who dislikes self-defense, lies about her record, and shilled for a radical Puerto Rican group.  It’s that the hearings showed something very, very specific about her:  she’s a complete mediocrity.  The woman is as dumb as a somewhat smart post.  She’s a slow thinker.  She’s uninformed.  She’s a tribute, not to brains and hard work, but to affirmative action.

On the good side.  It is entirely possible that the charming and tactful Justice Roberts might be able to move that slow brain into a different world view.  If she were as bright as he, it is likely that she’d be able to match him argument for argument.  As a lesser legal light (heck, a lesser anything light), she might not be able to muster coherent arguments to justify her positions, and may prove to be a very weak liberal link indeed.

You know that I don’t like judges.  I’ve certainly made no secret of that fact, and it’s no doubt a by-product of practicing law in a region crawling with activist judges.  Listening to Sotomayor struggle to articulate things — and to avoid her own footprint — in response to Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning is painful.  It’s especially embarrassing when you hear her try to explain why the Constitution directly addressed abortion.

(Graham’s questioning, incidentally, is excellent.  He makes incredibly good use of his “good ole boy” persona to leave her without anything to say.  When Sotomayor does answer, her answers are manifestly non-responsive.)

While Sotomayor’s incoherence and weaseling aren’t surprising, what is surprising is the truly nasty attack that Nancy Benac at the AP — the AP! — launched against her:

It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran.

After week upon week in which plenty of other people on the planet interpreted Sotomayor’s past comments, the Supreme Court nominee at last got a chance to deconstruct her own words Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Fingers splayed, palms flat, hands bouncing up and then deliberately pressing down to the table, Sotomayor elaborated, clarified, expanded, retracted.

She drew loopy circles on her paper; she ran rhetorical circles around her past words.

“I didn’t intend to suggest …” she explained.

“What I was speaking about …” she offered.

“As I have tried to explain …” she parsed.

“I wasn’t talking about …” she demurred.

She was a tough critic at times.

“I was using a rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” she averred.

“It was bad,” she said. Of her own words.

You really have to read the whole thing to get the flavor.  Benac is hostile.  It’s bizarre coming from an AP writer.  I wonder how long Benac will have a job.

UPDATE:  Welcome, Instapundit readers!  This is, of course, the obligatory (and heartfelt) “stop and look around” message.  I really do mean it, though.  Much as I’m delighted that you’re visiting this post, it’s not the best representation of how I write.  If you want to see whether I’m worth visiting again, you’ll get a better sense of me by reading this post (which is one of my periodic better efforts), or this one (which is pretty typical for me).

UPDATE II:  For more on the fact that Sotomayor is not merely imbecilic, but is also dishonest, Jennifer Rubin is a great place to start.  The question then, and it’s a question only for intellectual entertainment, is whether she knows she’s lying or whether she’s a pathological narcissist whose version of the absolute truth is always defined by the needs of the moment.

The Washington Post is warning Republican senators not to be mean to poor Judge Sotomayor.  It’s a funny (inadvertently funny) article, because the Post editors acknowledge that Obama was anything but gracious when he was a Senator; then they explain why, even though he wasn’t gracious, he was right; and then they urge Republicans to be totally nice to Sotomayor, presumably because Obama is still right.

Of course, the main reason Republicans are being told to be nice is because Sotomayor is a woman and a Hispanic.  If I were a senator, my opening statement, before I began my questions, would be short and sweet:

Welcome, Judge Sotomayor.  Before I begin my questions about your qualifications and your understanding of a Supreme Court justice’s role, I’d like to address one thing.  My questioning will be rigorous.  I will not offend you, and every woman and Hispanic in America, by acting as if either your sex or your ethnic identity have rendered you incapable of standing up to the same brisk scrutiny as any other judicial candidate who has appeared before this body.

Mine is a constitutional role and I take it very seriously.  The Supreme Court is the court of last appeal in this land, and it is the court that it is responsible for ensuring that the laws of this land comport with the Constitution.  I would therefore be remiss in my duty, and insulting to you, if I treated you as a lesser being by denying you the opportunity fully to explain your views.

UPDATE: More on the race issue.  After you’ve what Tom Elia has at his blog, come back and tell me if Jesse Washington’s comments make any sense at all.

Something very weird is going on when a woman has worked 25 plus years as a lawyer (in both the private and public sector), but has only about $1,000 in savings, and less than $1,000,000 in equity.

Financial records may show that (a) she gave everything to charity; (b) she gave everything to poor relatives; (c) she had terrible and costly health problems; (d) that she has a drug or gambling problem; or (e) that she is, and always had been, profligate beyond reason.  Suggestions (a) through (c) would speak well of the woman; possibilities (d) and (e) would speak badly of her, especially if she were being put forward to fill a job that requires wisdom, balance, and an understanding of the way business and money work.

I’m talking, of course, of Sonia Sotomayor, and the bizarre case of the missing money.   I wonder if this summer’s hearings will delve into this interesting little mystery.

Reviewing the facts and law is so passe.   The New Editor explains how it will be done in the Sotomayor era.

Phyllis Chesler wrote a nice column today reminding conservatives (a) not to Bork Sotomayor (because two wrongs definitely don’t make a right); and (b) to make sure to develop Sotomayor’s understanding of the Constitution and her role as a judge — because, after all, that is what this whole job interview is about.

Because of the good news/bad news that keeps flowing from Sotomayor’s sudden presence in the popular consciousness (which shows her as a potentially racist, potential protector of the First Amendment; potential identity politics ideologue, potential Catholic voter on abortion, etc.), Chesler is absolutely right about approaching Sotomayor with both diligence and respect.  The same good news/bad news cycle also reminded me of the Simpson’s episode “Hungry are the Damned.”  Pay close attention to the cookbook scene:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sotomayor’s statements about judges (better if they’re female and minority) and their role (to make policy) have been disturbing.  It’s worth nothing though that, as James Taranto points out that, on at least one occasion Sotomayor came out strongly in favor of free speech, even though it was very ugly speech:

Sotomayor Plays Against Type

Blogger Tom Goldstein has a roundup of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions on the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one First Amendment case caught our attention. Here’s Goldstein’s summary:

One of her more controversial cases was Pappas v. Giuliani, involving an employee of the New York City Police Department who was terminated from his desk job because, when he received mailings requesting that he make charitable contributions, he responded by mailing back racist and bigoted materials. On appeal, the panel majority held that the NYPD could terminate Pappas for his behavior without violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Sotomayor dissented from the majority’s decision to award summary judgment to the police department. She acknowledged that the speech was “patently offensive, hateful, and insulting,” but cautioned the majority against “gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech is does not like.”

In her view, Supreme Court precedent required the court to consider not only the NYPD’s mission and community relations but also that Pappas was neither a policymaker nor a cop on the beat. Moreover, Pappas’s speech was anonymous, “occur[ring] away from the office on [his] own time.” She expressed sympathy for the NYPD’s “concerns about race relations in the community,” which she described as “especially poignant,” but at the same time emphasized that the NYPD had substantially contributed to the problem by disclosing the results of its investigation into the racist mailings to the public. In the end, she concluded, the NYPD’s race relations concerns “are so removed from the effective functioning of the public employer that they cannot prevail over the free speech rights of the public employee.”

We’re not sure where we come down on this particular case, but we like Sotomayor’s instinct to err on the side of protecting speech–an instinct that was a hallmark of “liberal” jurisprudence in the days of the Warren court but really is not anymore.

[snip]

If President Obama’s first nominee turns out to be an old-style liberal with a reverence for free speech, the country could have done a lot worse.

I was also interested to read that there is concern on the Left that Sotomayor, a Catholic, is not a reliable vote on Roe v. Wade.  I won’t go into my abortion ambivalence here (sufficie it to say that I’m more pro-Life than I was, but less pro-Life than I could be), but I do find it interesting that her own fans are worried.

You can’t read a blog, attend a press conference, read a paper, or even think about Sotomayor without those 32 words popping into your head:

“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.”

Because the remark makes statements about people based on their race and sex, many have reached the obvious conclusion that Sotomayor was being racist and sexist.  Democratic partisans have rushed to her defense by contending that only racists and sexists would find a remark defining people by race and attribute to be, in fact, racist and sexist.  (Clearly, these people have been studying at the Humpty Dumpty school of English:  `When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’)

But isn’t there a much more obvious, less racially and sexually charged way to read that language, and one that reflects equally poorly on Sotomayor?  Let’s look at the context of her 32 words, as Jake Tapper did:

The larger context of the sentence is Sotomayor addressing former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s famous quote that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.”

“I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement,” Sotomayor says. “First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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.”

“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society,” she said. “Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.”

“However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give,” she continued. “For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

She went on to say that “each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

As you can see, the starting point for this discussion was O’Connor’s race and sex blind statement that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.”  (One could argue that this is ageist but, considering that we all hope to attain some degree of age, it’s hard to put a lot of weight behind that argument.)

Sotomayor’s approach to challenging this argument was to wander a little bit through selective judicial  history, and then to launch into discussion about her own race and sex, and her own life and experiences.  Her reference to that incredibly wise Latina woman must be seen in that context.  I’m therefore willing to bet that Sotomayor had not a thought in her head for the Latina saleswoman working in Macys, scrubbing someone’s floors, or doing duty as middle level management in a major American corporation.  This is all about Sotomayor.  In her estimation, she is that wise Latina woman.

In other words, Sotomayor has stumbled across the ultimate in identity politics:  she’s put herself into a victim class of ONE — herself.

As for me, the thought of having someone so self-centered sit in judgment on my case, or on legal issues that will affect me, is terrifying — almost more terrifying than if she was the racist and sexist her detractors claim her to be.

Are you wondering what an Obama court will look like?  You don’t need to look very far.  If you haven’t yet read Christina Hoff Sommers’ wonderful 1995 book, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, run out right now and get a copy.

Generally speaking, the book is about the difference between equity feminists (a view held by most Americans who believe that women should get equal treatment under the law and equal work for equal pay) and gender feminists (who have embraced victimhood and who hate men). Hoff Sommers makes compelling arguments about the insanity of the latter approach, and the death of the former.

While every chapter is well worth reading, the one chapter that’s stuck with me almost 15 years later is the one that predicts a Sotomayor/Obama court.  In this chapter (and I don’t have a copy in front of me), Hoff Sommers describes her attendance at a conference for feminist academics — or, more accurately, gender feminist academics.  Before these academics could even get to the business of the conference, they had to get to the even more serious business of putting in proper heirarchical order the various degrees of victimhood represented at the conference.

Even without the book to guide me, I have vivid memories of black feminists duking it out with lesbian feminists who are outraged by the demands made by handicapped hispanic feminists.  Each of these little feminist academic subsets was absolutely certain that its handicap (sex, race, sexual orientation, physical disability, etc.) entitled it to some special regard within the confines of the seminar — and, most certainly, out in the wide world.

You can see the parallels between a viewpoint that claims all attendees are not equal at a conference and all citizens are not all equal under the law.  Inevitability, once such a regime is enshrined, the special interest groups start duking it out over who is the most special.  The end result is people groveling before judges to assert their special victim status, while the judges, certain that they are founts of special wisdom because they have cast off the shackles of the traditional patriarchal legal system, opine from the bench about who is the most pathetic of all.

Nor is this scenario hypothetical or confined merely to the groves of academe.  I’ve worked a long time in the San Francisco Bay Area legal system and can tell you that, once all the white men and corporations have been cast into the dirt (which is already par for the course in many Bay Area courts), the fight is on to determine which group or person is sufficiently pathetic to become the recipient of the court’s identity politics beneficence.  The concept of equality at the law has no place here.  It’s anarchy.

This system is also insanely unreliable.  Although Sotomayor testified before the Senate back in 1998 that the law is meant to be unreliable (a statement I heard her make on the radio, but can’t find now), the fact is that the only good legal system is one that is reliable.

It is impossible for a business or an individual to plan ahead if it or he cannot predict with reasonable certainty what it’s rights are.  How can a bank make a loan if it cannot rely on the loan papers and the law to enforce that debt, but must instead rely on the court’s goodwill?  In a fight between a bank and a business, there’s a 50-50 chance the lender will win, unless of course the debtor business is women or minority (or gay or lesbian) owned.  In a fight between a bank and an individual, since banks are categorically evil, the bank will always lose.

It’s clearly a short term pleasure for the tyrannical activist justice to reach this ruling, but a long term disaster as banks refuse to grant loans and fail.  (Although, with the US owning banks now, I guess that was a lousy hypothetical.  The banks will continue to grant loans and they won’t fail because we, the taxpayers, are clearly stuck with paying for all the bad loans.)  California’s business exodus isn’t simply a result of high taxes; it’s also a result of grossly unfair judicial rulings.  Here are just two examples (and please pardon the poor formatting on the second example, which is a very old post I wrote while still at my Blogger site).

This way lies madness.