Two Or Three Of Ten Top Things
A Wise Latina Judge Should Ask
Her Race And Genderless Accusers
We should be talking about the facts of matter, like the settled (at least until now) law regarding affirmative action in public employment, or the narrow, utterly non-activist nature of Sonia Sotomayor’s vote in the New Haven fire fighters so-called “reverse discrimination” case.
But no. We’re gonna be talking about whether Sotomayor’s is inherently biased against white men because she’s a Latina. We’re gonna be talking about why she dared, in one speech and by her long standing advocacy for civil rights and Hispanic causes—before she was a judge— to even bring her identity up since she became one.
These questions are being framed by lead Senate Judiciary Republican Jeff Sessions, who the NYT reports, was rejected by that panel for a district court judgeship in Alabama in 1986 over charges of “racial insensitivity”.
How insensitive? Sessions record as a prosecutor included passionate prosecution of voting rights activists on trumped up voter fraud charges.Even then-Alabama Senator Howell Heflin—a Democrat in name but one of the last “Dixiecrats” at heart— voted against his confirmation, due to Heflin's doubts that Sessions would be unbiased.
So, the first two on the top ten list, in no particular order:
1-How, had God not been watching, would your background as white man of the South of a certain age bias you as a judge?
More to follow. Let’s see if we can’t push the Sotomayor nomination conversation beyond the obvious partisan, political and ideological “okey-dokes” into an entirely new frame: It’s not about who she is, it’s about those raceless, genderless ethnicly neutral default Americans who just happen to predominate in the Supreme Court, the Senate and most other precincts of power.
Who are you guys, anyway?
