Barely a Scratch
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:14 AM
It wasn't so much what Sonia Sotomayor said, but how she said it.
No matter what the Republicans threw at her, she didn't get rattled.
She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if addressing a class of junior high students. And she sounded so . . . reasonable.
The nominee made a wise decision to back off her wise Latina remark rather than splitting hairs in defending it. She even walked away from Obama's formulation that a judge, in a small percentage of cases, should be influenced by her heart. Beyond that, whether the subject was Roe or Ricci, she did what past Supreme Court nominees have done so effectively: discussed the issues in generalities while refusing to offer her specific views.
In the end, Sotomayor bobbed and weaved rather effectively. The Republicans barely laid a glove on her.
The focus of the hearing was not whether she's qualified for the high court, but whether her views render her out of the mainstream. That's a hard case to make after 17 years of narrowly tailored rulings. Even in the New Haven firefighters case, four members of the Supreme Court -- one short of a majority -- agreed with Sotomayor that the city was justified in throwing out what it regarded as a racially biased exam.
Perhaps the GOP senators didn't want to appear overly harsh on the first Hispanic (and only the third woman) named to the Supremes. So the questioning remained at an intellectual level. With Sotomayor's confirmation virtually assured and their party's base shrinking, the question for some Republicans is whether they should vote for her and save their firepower for another court nominee who might be easier to demonize.
Administration strategists have to be relieved that Sotomayor emerged relatively unscathed. The White House has plenty of legislative fights on its hands. Obama and company would love to get this thing behind them and focus on health care.
LAT: "Skeptical Republicans did no serious damage to President Obama's Supreme Court nominee during the first full day of questioning today, as an unruffled Judge Sonia Sotomayor cautiously, if at times ploddingly, fended off sharp questions."
USA Today: "Judge Sonia Sotomayor insisted Tuesday under pointed questioning that her ethnicity and gender will not influence her decisions if she is confirmed as the Supreme Court's first Hispanic justice."
Washington Times: "Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor retreated from her praise of the 'wise Latina,' endorsed a privacy right to abortion in the Constitution and insisted she was not opposed to gun ownership during a day of questioning on a string of hot-button issues before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday."
NYT: "Judge Sotomayor approached the task as a seasoned advocate. She struck a tone of attentive deference, avoided needless argument, said no more than she needed to prevail, stuck almost entirely to uncontroversial points and avoided antagonizing her questioners.
"The hearings have as a consequence, so far at least, failed to illuminate very much how Judge Sotomayor would approach the work of a Supreme Court justice. She was certainly prepared, apropos almost any question, to say that she would faithfully apply the law to the facts. Asked to describe whether she subscribed to one or another school of constitutional interpretation, she said, 'I don't use labels.' "
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick: "Even when Sotomayor is being questioned about her judicial record, the focus isn't on her legal approach or process but on the outcomes. So when she talks about her Ricci decision, Jeff Sessions asks her why she didn't apply affirmative action precedents that had no bearing in a case that was not an affirmative action case. When she speaks about Didden, her eminent domain case, Republican Chuck Grassley asks why she didn't analyze the Kelo precedent in a case about timely filing. Nobody wants to hear how she got to a result. They want to know why she didn't get to their result. Time and again she is hectored for deciding the narrow issues before her. It's like a judicial-activism pep rally in here.
"Senate Democrats are almost as confused. About half of them insist that she is a narrow, mechanical, pro-prosecution judge--the perfectly neutral umpire, John Roberts in sensible pumps. The other half utterly reject the balls-and-strikes talk, saying she's empathetic, dammit, and that's a good thing."
Why have the hearings been less than scintillating? In the New Republic, Michael Schaffer says it's a sign of the times:
"As a longtime confirmation junkie, I was thrilled about this prospect. With hot-button matters of race and privilege front and center, not to mention the bipartisan audience of deep-pocketed activists chanting for blood, the sessions could feature the sort of televisual drama that has made the judicial nomination proceedings -- which ought to be plodding exercises in legal analysis--some of the most compelling political theater in modern America. After years of boring judicial hearings, I eagerly awaited a return to the golden age of Confirmation Kabuki--a battle royale between those who would paint the judge as the American Dreamer of the South Bronx and those who would cast her as the Quota Queen of the West Village.
"But if the tepid-run up to the hearing and first day of questioning are any indication, the confirmation process is likely to be more seminar than sideshow. Ruy Teixeira argued that the absence of Thunderdome-style anticipation is a function of a culture war gone quiet. To me, the ennui has less to do with the prospective contents of the hearing, and more to do with the national culture in which they're taking place. In the age of Drudge and reality TV and twittering congressmen, the old gladiatorial magic of a confirmation face-off--with all those old quotes yanked out of context, all those hyperbolic speeches untethered by reality--no longer seems quite so unique. Previously a compelling interruption to the mundane regular news cycle, such theatrics now are the regular news cycle. In the process, hearings that might once have riveted the country now play like Project Runway, only with uglier models."
Well, maybe. But these particular hearings are tepid because everyone knows what the outcome will be. |
