Robots And Racists

Once again, Jeff Sessions is playing Robots and Racists.

That is, he's saying that judges at the federal level must be entirely dispassionate and unbiased, or they are biased and should be rejected for the Supreme Court. There is no middle ground here in Sessions's world. You are either one or the other. The implication is not that Sotomayor is incapable of handling her emotions (that particular misogyny seems to be Jon Kyl's line of attack) but that no judge should ever have emotions at all. If you do, that is an example of bias, and you are unfit for the Supreme Court. The strong implication here is that Sotomayor has a bias against white men because she approaches things from the perspective of a Latina.

One, haven't we had enough examples of that dangerous binary worldview over the last eight years? Iraq, Bush's "dead or alive" proclamation on bin Laden, Cheney's "one percent doctrine" assumptions, etc...none of those exactly turned out well, did they?

Second, as Andrew Pincus explains:

The issue at the heart of this exchange is perhaps too complex to explain in a hearing, with the attendant political constraints, but it is critical to an understanding of how courts operate. No one wants judges whose decisions are based on prejudices or sympathies. And there is no evidence that Judge Sotomayor has allowed bias to infect her rulings. Numerous studies show that she has often ruled against discrimination plaintiffs, individuals raising immigration claims, and criminal defendants.

But there is an important, albeit difficult-to-explain, difference between basing decisions on bias and basing them on experience. Take an easy example. In interpreting provisions of the Constitution the Supreme Court often applies a balancing test that takes account of the burden that various legal rules would impose on the government -- in criminal cases, on the prosecution. Parties argue about the extent of that burden in their briefs. If a Justice has experience as a prosecutor, she will be able to assess those arguments differently -- and almost certainly more incisively -- than a Justice who has no experience with the criminal justice system. Should that Justice be permitted to bring that experience to bear? Of course (and there would be no way to stop her from doing so). That Justice is not biased in favor of the prosecution; she is using her life experience to evaluate the arguments being made. That is why there is a huge benefit to having a Court with Justices of different experiences -- there is more likely to be at least one, hopefully more, Justices with experience relevant to the legal issues presented in the case.

This is not a novel concept. When Justice Marshall retired from the Supreme Court, Justice O'Connor explained that the life experiences he shared with the other Justices helped her better understand the legal issues that came before the Court.

I would expect a Supreme Court justice to have, well, a lifetime of experience in judicial matters. But Sessions is applying a ridiculous standard that equates experience with bias with the sole reason to try to pin charges of racism on Sotomayor.

It's ludicrous. Luckily, Sotomayor is more than able to easily deflect this lunacy, and she's making Sessions look rather foolish.

Here she explains the now infamous "wise Latina" remark as something meant to clearly inspire other Latina women.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. We don't need robots or racists on the bench, but intelligent judges with experience like Sonia Sotomayor.