One liberal Senator, however, gloated that what you saw won't be what you get with Justice Sotomayor:At the heart of those questions is another one, which has ignited a debate among legal scholars, advocates and members of Congress. Did the hearings reveal a true absence of liberal ideas in the 55-year-old judge President Obama chose to fill his first Supreme Court vacancy? Or did they reflect sheer political pragmatism by someone, coached by White House staff members and following the model of other recent nominees, seeking to maximize support by avoiding controversy?
Either way, Sotomayor's reticence, if not her nomination, has disappointed legal thinkers on the left. The hearings "did serious damage to the cause of progressive thought in constitutional law," said Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago Law School professor who was dean there when Obama joined its faculty. Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal think tank, called them "a totally missed opportunity. . . . The progressive legal project hit rock bottom [last] week."
And Cardin [D-MD], who announced on Friday that he will vote for Sotomayor, said he is encouraged by her judicial record and her private conversations before the hearings. When she came to his office, Cardin said, he told her he is concerned about civil rights issues. The nominee smiled, he recalled, and told him his concerns were "refreshing."
Two predictions:
- Sonia Sotomayor will turn out to be more liberal on the Supreme Court than she admitted to being under oath.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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29 comments:
You keep bashing Sotomayor for being liberal and pro-affirmative action and all that, but you know, her actual judicial record is very moderate, even a little conservative.
You seem to think that her speeches about wise Latinas and being an affirmative action baby and all that are more representative of the "real" Sotomayor than her 17-year judicial career.
But honestly, the conservatives in those Senate hearings came to believe that the real Sotomayor was the moderate judge, not the liberal speaker. Yet you draw the opposite conclusion based on what.....the Ricci case? One single case?
Enough with the Sotomayor scaremongering, Steve. She's not a brilliant legal scholar but she's a solid legal thinker with a very moderate record.
I'm the same anon who posted the comment about Steve's Sotomayor scaremongering.
Steve, I really like your stuff, I give you kudos for your quantitative approaches to things and your willingness to talk about the most un-PC of unPC topics. My own husband thinks you're a racist and is dismissive of your stuff for that reason.
BUT, you have the occasional big blind spot.
The Sotomayor-as-stealth-ultraliberal issue is one such blind spot. Sarah Palin's lack of intelligence and political savvy is another.
Obviously the present method of acquiring Supreme Court judges is now obsolete.
The framers never even intended for SCOTUS to review Congress much less create new quasi-legislative rulings. We hear pundits routinely suggest that the most important function of a President is his power to appoint justices. I think that's an exaggeration but still, what happened to democracy?
The Supreme Court selecton process is now throughly corrupt. Few think Sotomayor is being fully candid. She is running for a Justiceship. She is making in effect campaign promises for which she never expects to be held responsible. In fact she is almost certainly lying through her teeth.
The general public is rather adept at sensing dissembling. But Sotomayor doesn't have to face the public just fellow party members.
Non-Western peoples didn't create the backwaters they live in by being broadly progressive: they aren't conservatives or liberals. Those are Western views. Third world peoples are troglodytic or particularist.
Sotomayor's legal philosophy isn't reasoned: its just an amalgamation of things that happened to be good or bad for her.
She got racial preferences? Racial preferences good. She climbed in the prosecutor's office?Prosecutors good. She did poorly on standardized tests? Testing bad.
If SNL ever attacked from the right, Sotomayor would be fantastic fodder for the old caveman Frankenstein's monster skit.
I guess there's an argument that by being unwilling to defend cultural Marxism, when she was anyway assured of getting through, she weakened cultural Marxist ideological hegemony in our society? Hmm, maybe a little bit.
We're living in an age when Jim Crow and Apartheid have been inverted. Whatever NAM's do is noble, whether it’s just making an ordinary living, whether lying, discriminating, minimal work, cheating or murdering.
Whatever whites do is bad or evil or useless, whether it is building Porsche's, aeroplanes, roads, hospitals or other endeavours. When whites perform in Uni it’s because if racism, when they make money, they were abusing someone, when they outperform NAM's the supreme court has to step in. It’s so ridiculous and childish. At least with Apartheid the ability went with the power. Now it’s the inverse. Of course this cannot be sustained, and eventually the US has to go the same route as South Africa or Rhodesia before that.
The present methods are "obsolete" for the same reason jury trials are less useful than they once were: oaths are meaningless and people like Sotomayor have no sense of honor to keep them from lying to get into power and push the liberal agenda.
Big Bill, agree with you!
"Sonia Sotomayor will turn out to be more liberal on the Supreme Court than she admitted to being under oath."
I am of the opinion that she is not as liberal as you or some of your other commenters think she is. I think she's pretty liberal on racial issues, but on all other issues she seems to be quite moderate.
Besides the Ricci case, no one has brought to my attention any other cases she has decided that scream "CRAZY LIBERAL!"
For example, I noted Sotomayor's conservative stance on states rights in which she took the same viewpoint as Frank Easterbrook, a well known conservative judge.
Sotomayor has a very moderate and restrained judicial record despite her liberal personal views. Steve I really do not think your side has anything to worry about. Her circuit court decision on Ricci was motivated more by stare decisis rather than anything else. Ruling in Ricci's favor before it got to the Supreme Court would have been a more "activist" decision.
Why does Ricci mean so much to Sotomayor?
I think its because its a microcosim of her career as a jurist. She is simply getting the Supreme Courty gig because of her race and sex. There are MANY more informed, better legal minds out there who would be much more qualified to be on our highest court rather than her, AND SHE KNOWS IT.
Maybe the Supreme court ought to have a IQ requirement or better yet a Ricci-like test to determine if you are -worthy- of consideration. The test should be designed for only the top 10% of all lawyers to be able to really ace it. If she could prove she was in the top 10% of her profession, then I'd be for her sitting on OUR Supreme Court, final arbiter of law in our land.
There's always that risk. David Souter, who comes from the next town over, was thought to be even a bit on the nutso conservative side around here. It was he as Attorney General for NH who prepared the legal defense when Governor Thomson lowered the flags to half-staff on Good Friday.
"Perhaps they would be willing to step down and give them their fair share. You think?"
Him and Emily Bazelon.
What is Sotomayor's race?
the supreme court votes 5-4 a lot of the time now on "ultimate culture war!" cases. this turns many rulings on social issues into a simple supreme court head count. so why does it matter what kind of judge she becomes in sum total? she will mainly replace souter's liberal vote in most "ultimate culture war!" cases.
the supreme court seems to do a decent job getting the correct vote on non-"ultimate culture war!" issues, so i'm not concerned about how she'll rule on those.
she's an usurper, there to remove european men from their ability to control their own society. she should not even be eligible to be a supreme court justice. barack obama has gone full speed ahead, putting usurpers into positions of authority as the heads of many agencies. while they may hold various ideas and opinions, one thing they all agree on is the need to stop white guys from running the show.
Anonymous #1, you might want to see a shrink about that Stockholm syndrome.
How on earth could you possibly be unaware that moderate, ultraliberal, pro-affirmative action, etc, are all synonyms? Of course Sotomayor believes what she said in all those speeches. Everyone does. It's the mainstream of 21st-century American legal thought. That's the problem.
Meanwhile, her primary intellectual achievement appears to consist of being taught to spell properly and use correct grammar - at Princeton.
Unfortunately, Professor Winn, her Communist Svengali, didn't quite get around to explaining the difference between "vagrancy" and "vagary" or "eminent" and "imminent," telling her how to use a comma properly, or in general teaching her how to appear as anything but what she is - a natural-born DMV supervisor with an IQ of 105. Fortunately, her opinions on the Court will be written by her clerks, as they always have been.
In other words, it's not just that the emperor is naked, it's that he weighs 400 pounds and is wearing a bikini top and a thong. And you blame Steve for noticing this? Very fetching, your contentment with your masters.
Rob has made a very good point regarding most of the 3rd world's style of "thought." It can be very frustrating trying to communicate with these people as Western standards of logic and scientific thinking seems so "foreign" to them. I had an African Poli Sci professor who would straight-out lie to make a political point to the class. I used to think this was some sort of moral deficiency but latter realized it was do to natural differences in perceptions of truth.
In the West we strive for the truth regardless of ideology, while 3rd worlders see the interests of the tribe or individual before anything. This is an extreme disadvantage we suffer from in the West. It works very well when its only Westerners but when in competition with other groups, Westerners are at a great disadvantage.
Look at how the SWPLs just eat up speeches from people like Obama or MLK. SWPLs truly believe in all this stuff about "everyone treated equally," when in reality, these words are purely for political warfare purposes.
Westerners are very difficult to defeat on a standard battlefield but seem to have much difficulty in political war or 5th generation warfare (5GW).
There are MANY more informed, better legal minds out there who would be much more qualified to be on our highest court rather than her, AND SHE KNOWS IT.
I agree with this statement. As Steve has pointed out before, this knowledge is what makes many AA recipients so angry. Best example is Mrs O. You'd think with all that pandering and enabling there would be gratitude, but instead there is anger. I've never seen a pick of Soto where she does not look like a butch, er ...bitch.
"I used to think this was some sort of moral deficiency but latter realized it was do to natural differences in perceptions of truth.
In the West we strive for the truth regardless of ideology, while 3rd worlders see the interests of the tribe or individual before anything. This is an extreme disadvantage we suffer from in the West. It works very well when its only Westerners but when in competition with other groups, Westerners are at a great disadvantage."
That is true. This reminds me of the posters in the African-American club room at school. On the posters were these pictures of many great historical figures who were born in Africa yet would falsely portray some caucasian rulers as sub-saharan black Africans, the most prominent being Cleopatra and the Carthaginian general, Hannibal. There is no reason to doubt that they were caucasian. There were many others I'm not very familiar with, but probably only a few of them were truly sub-saharan Africans or mixed.
Also, try telling an Indian that the northern Indian(Indo-Aryan) languages are Indo-European(and therefore related to most European languages and not to the southern Indian Dravidian languages), and they will get perplexed or angry. They will probably accuse you of lying or not understanding India, even though the classification of Indo-Aryan languages like Punjabi and Hindi and Bengali as Indo-European is an established fact in historical linguistics.
Similarly, many Dominicans who are mulatto or 75% black will similarly deny their blackness and claim they are actually descended from very dark Spaniards or the original natives of Hispaniola. Never call a Dominican a "negro" or a "moreno" unless you want to commit suicide by Dominican. This self-hatred is due in large part to their intense hatred for their poorer Haitian neighbors, who occupy the western 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola.
Steve, you made two predictions. Here are my two predictions:
1.) In a few years, Hollywood will make a movie along the lines of "Stand and Deliver" or "The Great Debaters" about a group of black and Latino firefighters studying hard to pass the promotion exam while a clique of white firefighters pull all sorts of shenanigans, using their "in" with the test writers, to frustrate their efforts. The whites even make threatening late-night phone calls and burn a cross on L.L. Cool J's lawn. However, in the end, the blacks pull off the top scores!
2.) Once Sotomayor is on the SCOTUS, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will for the first time in her life be referred to as "the good-looking one."
"There is no reason to doubt that they were caucasian."
I there were "do doubt" the poster wouldn't be there.
"What is Sotomayor's race?"
Wise latina.
Truth thinks that there is some doubt about Hannibal and Cleopatra's race. Carthage was a Phoenician colony. Most of its inhabitants were Phoenicians, certainly the members of the Barca royal family were. They were Semites - related to Jews and Arabs.
Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII) was not a sub-Saharan black, she was not even an Egyptian, she was a Greek (Macedonian). There are lots of mysteries about race in ancient history - but not in the Ptolemaic bloodline. The Ptolemy’s were fanatical about preventing their bloodline from being polluted by Egyptians much less sub-Saharan Africans. The Macedonians lived in their own city and had as little contact as possible with the locals.
The whole myth of Cleopatra being black is based on a single missing record of one of the mistresses of her grandfather. Normally the Ptolemy’s kept scrupulous racial records.
As an occupying power the Ptolemy’s were hyper sensitive about race mixing. The mystery concubine was not known to be a Black or an Egyptian. She is simply unknown. She was probably also a Greek, but the propagandists seized this omission in a set of records that had been maintained to guard against miscegenation as proof that there had been a Black ancestor of Cleopatra.
Even if that concubine had been Black it wouldn't have mattered. Her father and mother were brother and sister and pure Greek.
I AM SO WORRIED ABOUT FUTURE PUERTO RICAN ACHIEVEMENT IN THESE UNITED STATES THAT I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
MY ONLY THOUGHT IS THAT LA RAZA MUST IMMEDIATELY DIRECT MORE RESOURCES IN THIS DIRECTION.
PLEASE MORE HIGH ATTAINMENT OF POWER POSITIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE FOR BRONZE RACE PEOPLE. IT IS DISGUSTING THAT THE BRONZE RACE HAS BEEN HELD DOWN SO LONG BY CONSERVATIVES.
GAWD THE BRONZE RACE JUST MAKES ME TINGLE ALL OVER. WHY CAN'T THE ENTIRE EARTH BE COVERED BY BRONZE RACE PEOPLE? IT IS A CRIME THAT IT IS NOT SO.
"Truth said...
"There is no reason to doubt that they were caucasian."
I there were "do doubt" the poster wouldn't be there."
No real classicist or egyptologist thinks that Hannibal or Cleopatra were black. Only blacks deluded by a deep-seated inferiority complex believe such nonsense.
But then, you probably believe Beethoven was black - another common delusion among many blacks. Believe what you want. Nobody cares what a guy who calls himself "Truth" thinks. And don't bother replying with a lame snide remark, or call me "sport". You are not amusing, despite what you think. You are a rather typical black braggart with a self-confidence completely unwarranted by your talent. You are an annoying waste of time on this blog, and nearly everyone hear wants you to just go away.
Basically, anybody who lived prior to the advent of photography was Black. Including Julius Caesar, George Washington, Mozart, and all the Kings, Queens, Dukes, and Earls.
In Japan and in China as well, many such Western figures from long ago are depicted with rather non-round eyes.
In the Time-Life classical music series, the cover art depicting the composers gave them a pronounced Ashkenazy glow, even Beethoven, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky.
Just as the Pillsbury Dough Boy has acquired an odd golden glow (baked)? I am now waiting for his eyes to darken...
it is funny how the ridiculous claims that Hannibal and Cleophatra were black are quickly becoming mainstream.
the problem with blacks, just women, is the complete lack of relevance in their participation in history. the most important black man that has ever lived was Othelo
unfortunately, a fictional character crated by an evil, dead, white male
Cleopatra black etc...
It seems impossible but each time the flag is planted in ever more bizarre territory, its stays there. Seemingly impervious to recorded history.
Its almost as if, once the claim has been made, its just not polite to refute it. I think some of the ethnic chauvanists involved are fully aware of this. Who is going to look them in the eye and tell them they are lying, I mean, what are you are a racist?
There is another similar industry involved in claiming that major historical figures were actually homosexual.
The end point will presumably be reached when all sigificant historical figures are deemed to have been both black & gay.
So how to explain the recent era of dominance by straight white men?
Well somehow those jealous troglodytes usurped their betters with that old white trick knowledge.
Race & Gender of Judges Make Enormous Differences in Rulings, Studies Find
Amazing!
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