Sotomayor

May 27th, 2009

Surprise! The right wing is now declaring that Sotomayor is “a liberal judicial activist of the first order”! Various sources have different ways of expressing it, but that’s the general tone. She’s liberal! And activist! Who’da guessed they’d come up with those arguments?

After the last several SCOTUS appointments from the right, representing about as right-wing you can possibly imagine without nominating Attila the Hun, conservatives don’t get to claim this without people snickering. Especially when it is the conservative Supreme Court justices who “legislate from the bench”–that is, they either strike down laws passed by Congress far more than liberal justices, or they simply ignore the law and instead proscribe whatever the hell they feel like, as in Scalia’s dissent to McCreary in which he uses legal violations as precedent to rewrite the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Surely, the right wing has depleted the whole “most liberal” attack after having claimed that every Democratic presidential candidate is “the most liberal Democrat” around, and that every nominee is “the most liberal nominee” out of all candidates.

In short, all the arguments against Sotomayor amount to this: “She’s not conservative.” That’s virtually the only meaningful description of why the right wing will rail against her and claim that she is the Nth coming of the Liberal Satan.

And, of course, after the last eight years of Republicans claiming that the president gets to choose anyone and the Congress is required to rubber-stamp it, they don’t get to do much more than impotently rant. By their own standards.

Which, of course, they never follow themselves.

  1. Tim Kane
    May 27th, 2009 at 10:23 | #1

    To quote Cheney, “We won the election. It’s our due.”

    Judges are supposed to be activist, with a bias towards fairness and liberty, in that order. Let’s hope she’s an activist judge with an argumentative mind of the first order that can make the right wing idiots on the court look stupid, trite and small minded.

    If Americans wanted another right wingnut judge they would have voted for McCain. Of course it did the Republicans no good by nominating Palin – an idiot of the first order.

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