A Failed Conversation

Gop Assertions To The Contrary, The Sotomayor Hearings Shed Little Light On Either Race Or Justice

Near the end of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, announced to a reporter that he was "proud" that the Senate Republicans had taken up the challenge laid down by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this year when in a speech at the Justice Department he said that America is a "nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race. Mr. Sessions' cynical misappropriation of Mr. Holder's call for candid racial dialogue was just another in the long list of the calculated and deeply corrosive manipulations that characterized the discussion of race in the Judiciary Committee chambers.

Going into the hearings, the Senate Republicans knew, as did almost anyone who's examined Judge Sotomayor's opinions in cases from her 17 years on the bench, that she is no activist, no ideologue and no racial partisan. In fact, Judge Sotomayor is such a centrist that her record might well have given pause to liberals. For the Republicans, there were only two issues about which they could question Judge Sotomayor: her speeches in which she talked about the way race and gender contribute to how a judge sees the world and thus approaches the law, and her decision upholding a lower court's opinion in the New Haven firefighter case.

Her now-infamous "wise Latina" statement raised legitimate questions about Judge Sotomayor's approach to judging. But in the context of the full speeches she gave, Judge Sotomayor's remarks were an honest attempt to talk about how all judges are shaped by their backgrounds and must be conscious enough of this reality to guard against how these influences might skew their judicial view.

The firefighter case was problematic for the Republicans as well, because although the Supreme Court overturned the decision of the court on which Judge Sotomayor was a part, it had done so by announcing a new legal standard - one that Judge Sotomayor could not fairly have been expected to divine or impose as an appellate court judge when she heard the case. But no matter. The case involved the inflammatory issue of race, and combined with her "wise Latina" remark, the Republican committee members settled on a strategy that could at least arouse their base. And so, ignoring thousands of decisions in which Judge Sotomayor has participated, they undertook to paint the nominee as a dangerous racial partisan.