Sotomayor Saga

Poster (c) Baraboo Circus Museum; Sotomayor WhiteHouse.com; Beck from Glenn beck web site screen shot.

“Barrio” Baby With Disability Becomes Supreme Court Justice! Film at 11.”
Steffen Schmidt

Sonia (or Maria as Gov Huckabee called her) Sotomayor is now a Supreme Court Justice of the United States. She’s the first Hispanic and another woman (now there are two) on the Court, the first justice to grow up in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South Bronx, a diabetic from an early age, and top of her class in law school at Yale. She’s proud to be an American (AND a Latina woman), has been fairly hard on criminals as a judge (her neighborhood as a kid was infested with crime and she did not take kindly to that), and is a workaholic who sacrificed having a family for her work.

No wonder most of the GOP Senators voted against her! This is obviously an unpatriotic, incompetent, affirmative action, Socialist, and even racist (as Newt Gingrich called her) Democrat appointee.

Mel Martinez of Florida is a Cuban born refugee to the USA, a Conservative, and the ONLY Hispanic Republican in Congress. Actually he WAS the only GOP Hispanic because he quit a few days after the Sotomayor confirmation and before his term as Florida Senator is up. He put it this way, “Politically, its not a helpful moment for Republicans with Hispanics.” Only a Brit could have been so understated! Actually, her nomination has been a body blow to the GOP.

1. It undermines the theme that Obama does not practice bipartisan politics since nine Republicans and two “independents” voted for her confirmation including Martinez and even Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The badly wounded and minority Republicans where whittled down to a shamefully small number on this fight. This appointment HAD bipartisan support.

2. The GOP understands that Latinos/Hispanics are important to politics. They are the largest minority with 15% of the United States population and they are registering and voting in significant numbers all over the US. So why on Earth did they pick this fight when it is now the Litmus test of which is a Hispanic-friendly party and the Republicans lost that contest! In 2008 the GOP lost most of the Hispanic voters who had come around the party when George Bush promised them “compassionate conservatism” and used his brother Jeb’s wife and a nephew, who is part Hispanic and speaks great Spanish, to make the case for the GOP.

3. With African-Americans making up another 14% or so of the population and also voting mostly Democrat the GOP Senators may believe that the race and ethnicity card will bring them back to majority. Still, as Peter Drivas wrote in the Huffington Post “Fox News' Glenn Beck is feeling the consequences of his controversial comments on the July 28 episode of "Fox and Friends," when he said that Barack Obama was a "racist" who had a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." When bid advertisers start getting nervous about the Conservative race card the GOP establishment should take notice.

4. What, you hadn’t heard about the race card?! Shocking! Yes there is some pretty good analysis out there (confirmed to me by some of my deep cover Republican friends) that the strategy is to drive a wedge between male, lower income, white voters by stimulating the race card. Already the polls show that this demographic is now deeply suspicious if not outright hostile to Osama and by bank shot, the Democrats. The Henry Louis Gates/White police officer incident in Cambridge, Mass (Google it if you don’t have a clue – Here is Gates own commentary @ The Root http://www.theroot.com/views/accident-time-and-place) is being used as a “See, the minorities are taking over and the Dems and Obama are on their side” recruiting mechanism. Sotomayor plays perfectly into that whole strategy. She’s the “affirmative action justice” (AFJ) because she did well in college because she was treated differently and unfairly benefitted by being a woman, a Hispanic, and a person with disability – see she had three strikes in her favor according to the Anti-Soto crowd.

5. It is possible that all this race baiting will work. Never overestimate the public and voters who will shoot themselves in the foot with emotion and side shows while the main events are happening over there in the Big Tent of the political circus. Those “main attractions” would be things like health care cost and availability, the dangerous war in Afghanistan, the perilous US economy, jobs, the future of Social Security, jobs, a future rise in fuel prices, jobs, global warming and climate change, and jobs.

In the meantime I guess lets rage on. It’s no worse than what liberals and Democrats did to Clarence Thomas or Judge Bork and what Republicans did to Anita Hill in those horrible confirmation hearings. How quickly we forget.


©2009SchmidtEducationalAuthoringServices (SEAS L.L.C.) Syndication. Use only with permission. Steffen Schmidt is professor of political science at Iowa State University and writes for InsiderIowa.com.