Double Shot Of S'Truth

Andy Serwer serves up a pair of smoking posts over at Tapped on just how badly the conservatives are already losing the Sotomayor fight. First, some food for thought:

David Kurtz catches this article in The Hill that cites Curt Levey suggesting that Sonia Sotomayor's love of Puerto Rican food may be part of what conservatives will allege is racial bias.

Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.”

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ tongue and ears — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

I'm leaning towards Kurtz' conclusion, this has to be a joke. Pigs' feet and chick peas = activist judge? The shark is not visible from this altitude.

If it was a joke, it's one that about as a funny as this:


Secondly, it's nice to see ol Pat Buchanan and Stuart Taylor prove the need for affirmative action in 2009.

I've already responded to some of Taylor's assertions, so I won't do that here. I merely want to point out this passage from Samuel Alito's confirmation, highlighted by Glenn Greenwald:

Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position.

[...]

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

This is Samuel Alito, arguing that his experience of being the son of Italian immigrants, his knowledge of discrimination, gives him empathy that offers insight into such cases. How is this qualitatively different from Sotomayor saying that her knowledge of such things might maker her a better judge? It isn't--in fact, Alito is arguing the same thing, that his life experience gives him insight into the way laws affect people in real life, the exact quality Obama said he was looking for in a nominee. Like Sotomayor, Alito was merely commenting on the way life experience shapes one's vision of the law.

The conservative freakout over Sotomayor's remarks, as opposed to the way Alito's were marketed as a selling point for him as a judge, makes a remarkably salient case for why we still need affirmative action. Two judges made similar points--one was an Italian American man, the other was a Latino woman, both accomplished on the bench--but what was sold as a strength for Alito makes Sotomayor a racist. Taylor and Buchanan, while attacking Sotomayor, have inadvertently made the case for a policy they'd like to see eliminated, by proving that all things being equal, a minority woman is held to a different standard than the white man of similar background and experience.

And it's that different standard that exists because...surprise...the levers of power have been controlled by white men for the better part of centuries. Effort to remedy that are automatically somehow "racist" and yet as Serwer says, Buchanan and Taylor's differing standards and responses to the life experience question coloring judicial decisions for Alito versus Sotomayor has to be based on either race or gender (or both)...there is no other logical conclusion.

Do conservatives not have any idea how much damage has already been done in just 36 hours on this issue? Clearly not, and yet if they wanted to remind people why women, minorities and younger Americans have been abandoning the GOP in droves, there you are.