Sotomayor

A few thoughts:

• Right after Souter announced his retirement rumors quickly emerged that Obama would appoint a female Hispanic to the bench as a political "two-fer". The New Republic took such talk seriously enough that they ran a column examining Sotomayor's record even before she was announced. Next thing you know Obama trots out a female Hispanic to be his nominee. Now, maybe Obama really did do a thorough search of the best candidates for the job and came up with Sotomayor, but I don't think I'd bet my life on it.
  

• Critics of Sotomayor have made a lot of hay about her comment about a "wise Latina woman" having superior judgment over a white man. Defenders say that it was taken out of context and that it isn't the big deal some are making it out to be. And maybe that is true. But if so, why has Obama felt the need to say that she would have restated matters if given the chance to do things over?
  

• Many conservatives are rankled by the fact that Democrats blocked the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the federal court of appeals but are supposed to give Sotomayor the kid gloves treatment because of her ethnicity. While I can sympathize with that line of thinking, the fact is that Estrada didn't get nominated for the Supreme Court with Democrats squashing him early on precisely so they could avoid the specter of opposing a Hispanic nominee to the country's highest court. While few people closely monitor lower court appointments everyone pays attention to the Supreme Court.
  

• I can't help thinking of Obama's own weird actions in response to President Bush's nomination of Justices Alito and Roberts. Obama voted against Roberts even while writing a defense of his Democratic colleagues who voted for him. Far stranger was his treatment of Alito. Obama criticized an attempt to filibuster the nomination, then voted for the filibuster, and then voted against the nomination. Talk about trying to have it every which way.
  

• She isn't unqualified and really that's all that matters. She has the academic background and experience, and unless she can be successfully portrayed as utterly out to lunch (and the best shot in this regard appears to be race) will be easily confirmed. That doesn't mean I like it, and the apparent identity politics appalls me, but this is the reality of the situation.

Update: Has she given critics enough rope to hang herself with? I wonder if her apparent race obsession could come back to haunt her:

She became the outspoken leader of a Puerto Rican student group, leading other Hispanics to file a complaint against Princeton with the federal government to force the hiring of Hispanic faculty members and administrators. “She was very passionate about affirmative action for women and minorities,” said Charles Hey, another Puerto Rican student.

At Yale Law School, she was co-chairman of a group for Latin, Asian and Native American students — a catchall group for nonblack minorities. There she led fellow students in meetings with the dean to push for the hiring of more Hispanic faculty members at the law school. And, friends say, she shared the alarm of others in the group when the Supreme Court prohibited the use of quotas in university admissions in its 1978 decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

As a lawyer, she joined the National Council of La Raza and the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, two Hispanic civil rights groups that advocate for vigorous affirmative action. As a judge, she has repeatedly argued for diversity on the bench by alluding to the insights she gleaned from her Latina background.

In one of the few cases dealing with the subject that she helped decide on the federal appeals court, Ricci v. New Haven, she ruled in favor of the city’s ’s decision to discard the results of an exam to select firefighters for promotion because too few minority firefighters scored high enough to advance. White firefighters who had scored well on the discarded test sued, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case in April.

Race conscious policies isn't obscure law and a concept that most of the public can understand -- and I imagine oppose. Obama's own victory undercuts the argument in favor of such policies, which seem to presume that most Americans are racist.