Sotomayor good fit for Obama

From various accounts, they have a lot in common: over-rated intellect, bullying temperament, inflated ego, promotion beyond competence level, and an obsession with race.

The best-and-brightest administration rolls on, though this Obama pick will wield power for life:

From The New Republic, May 4:

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue." (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, "Will you please stop talking and let them talk?")

[. . .]

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It's customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn't distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions--fixing typos and the like--rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants.

Read on. To be fair, some people do think she's smart and able.

She's a brilliant choice in that she's got a short paper trail on abortion. Whether she is still a practicing Catholic is not only unclear but mostly irrelevant: being Catholic doesn't stop public officials from supporting abortion. But Kathryn Jean Lopez points out that she might "be at least Catholic enough to add to Team Obama's FOCA cover."

Liberals would like more proof that she's pro-abort:

Pro-choice groups may feel a bit queasy on this because she actually hasn't ruled on the constitutionality of abortion but you would think they have to feel that her liberal leanings will point her in the "right direction".

Pleeze. They'd have to be certifiably insane to imagine her anything but pro-abortion. I don't think the left needs to lose much sleep over that.

That she's committed to judicial activism is indisputable. Her decisions have a high rate of being overturned. And some of her statements about ethnicity and gender are downright shocking:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

And she suggested that "inherent physiological or cultural differences" may help explain why "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging."

You don't have to be a white male to be offended by those statements. If I didn't know that liberals can't be racist, I might get a racist vibe from them. The "physiological" statement begs for explanation. Will our senators question her on that?

Wendy Long sums it up:

Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written. She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one's sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.

NB: Verum Serum was the first to publicize Sotomayor's statements, quoted above.
Links here:
Court is Where Policy is Made Video
Speech at Berkeley

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