Wolf Howling: sotomayer

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Despicable Identity Politica Of The Left

As anyone who lived through the Clarence Thomas hearings can tell you, to earn the support of the left, you must be a member of a victim group AND graciously accept your victim status. The converse is also true - the quickest way to earn the vitriolic condemnation of the left is to be a member of a lefty recognized victim group, yet not toe the approved victim line. Thus Judge Sotomayor is a darling of the left - a historic nomination of a Hispanic to the Supreme Court. To challenge her is to be painted as a racist or misogynist.

Yet, in 2001, it was the left who used all of the tricks at their disposal to prevent Miguel Estrada being named to the DC Court of Appeals - concerned that he was a "LATINO" being "groomed for the Supreme Court." Byron York explores the story of Mr. Estrada and his despicable treatment by the left in some detail today.

This from Byron York writing at the Washington Examiner:

. . . [S]ome of the very people who are today praising Sotomayor spent their time [in 2001-03] devising extraordinary measures to kill Estrada's chances.

Born in Honduras, Estrada came to the United States at 17, not knowing a word of English. He learned the language almost instantly, and within a few years was graduating with honors from Columbia University and heading off to Harvard Law School. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, was a prosecutor in New York, and worked at the Justice Department in Washington before entering private practice.

Estrada's nomination for a federal judgeship set off alarm bells among Democrats. There is a group of left-leaning organizations -- People for the American Way, NARAL, the Alliance for Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, and others -- that work closely with Senate Democrats to promote Democratic judicial nominations and kill Republican ones. They were particularly concerned about Estrada.

In November, 2001, representatives of those groups met with Democratic Senate staff. One of those staffers then wrote a memo to Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, informing Durbin that the groups wanted to stall Bush nominees, particularly three they had identified as good targets. "They also identified Miguel Estrada as especially dangerous," the staffer added, "because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."

It was precisely the fact that Estrada was Hispanic that made Democrats and their activist allies want to kill his nomination. They were determined to deny a Republican White House credit, political and otherwise, for putting a first-rate Hispanic nominee on the bench.

Durbin and his colleagues did as they were instructed. But they had nothing with which to kill the nomination -- no outrageous statement by Estrada, no ethical lapse, no nothing. What to do?

They brainstormed. Estrada had once worked in the Justice Department's Office of Solicitor General, right? (Appointed under the first President Bush, Estrada stayed to serve several years under Clinton.) That office decides which cases the government will pursue in the Supreme Court, right? And that process involves confidential legal memoranda, right? Well, why don't we suggest that there might be something damaging in those memos -- we have no idea whether there is or not -- and demand that they be made public?

Durbin and his colleagues knew the Bush Justice Department would insist the internal legal memos remain confidential, as they always had been. It wasn’t just the Bush Administration that thought releasing the documents was a terrible idea; all seven living former Solicitors General, Republican and Democrat, wrote a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy begging him to back off.

But the Democrats didn't back off. They had a new, very serious question to ask: What is Miguel Estrada hiding?

The answer was nothing, of course. But the strategy worked. Democrats stonewalled Estrada's nomination, and, after losing control of the Senate in 2002, they began an unprecedented round of filibusters to block an entire slate of Bush appeals-courts nominees, Estrada among them. . . .

And that was how Democrats treated the last high-level Hispanic court nominee. Think about that when you watch their lovefest with Sonia Sotomayor.

Read the entire article.

Idiocy On The Right

There are several very disturbing things about Obama's nomination for the Supreme Court, Judge Sotomayor. For example, there is her seemingly casual reverse racism, there is her belief that the Second Amendment is not binding on the states, and there is her pro-plaintiff orientation that she takes the plaintiff's side even in cases where the law is so clear that her decision is overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. These are serious. But we will never get to them - and never have a chance to explain them to the public at large - if the idiots are let loose to make ad hominem attacks on Judge Sotomayor.

Case in point - at the top of Memorandum today, sucking the air away from everything that really matters, is an entry by Think Progress memorializing talk show host G. Gordon Liddy's attempt at humor, saying of Judge Sotomayer.

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

This is the type of ad hominem attack I would expect out of the left. It is not what I would expect out of the right. It is puerile and counterproductive in the extreme. Let's hope someone smacks some sense into Mr. Liddy in the near future - and indeed, all on the right who are exaggerating the case against Judge Sotomayor. I have previously commented on the non-issue of her statement saying that appellate courts make policy - they in fact do, and that is not coextensive with judicial activism. And see No Oil For Pacifists, who takes on today those on the right who are exaggerating the attack on Judge Sotomayor in other ways. If we don't clean this up and focus on what matters, it will allow the left to effectively discount all of our arguments.

Links On Saturday

Doug Ross has continued his work on Dealergate. Despite what you have read, this one is far from done yet. And Doug even gets some surprising help from Olby.

Doug Ross was also kind enough to include me in his collection of links. Do please pay him a visit.

Pirates Man Your Women, taking stock of the calamity of the first six months, asks of Obama, "what is next burning the Constitution using the Flag?" Heh.

You can read my post below on the Nancy Pelosi and the left's plans for a massive expansion of government and taxation using the excuse of limiting carbon emissions. I include in there a mention of the internationalists who want to soak the U.S. with a carbon tax payable to the UN for redistribution to third world countries who have supposedly suffered injury due to global warming. And here is a story today on the Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) who plan to move this issue to the top of the list at the next IPCC / UN Summit in Copenhagen. They claim 315,000 deaths last year due to global warming. Given that the world has been on a cooling spell for the last seven years, excuse me if I might think the numbers a bit cooked and the motivation not quite as stated.

And in a couple of related notes, across the pond, Bishop Hill actually goes behind the story to see how the numbers were cooked. A.J. Strata notes that "Global warming BS is popping up everywhere." Meanwhile, the boys at Crusader Rabbit have taken a look at their local forecast (brrrrrr) and are now casting about to find something to burn, hoping to release more carbon dioxide in their local atmosphere.

The Paragraph Farmer offers some cogent thoughts on the religion in America and the rewriting of history. You can also find an exceptional speech on the canard of a "wall between church and state" and the damage it has wrought by the brother of William Buckley.

Ted Leddy documents with distate the return to sectarianism in Ireland, telling the story of the 49 year old father beaten to death by a gang of hooligans following a Catholic versus Protestant soccer match.

I wonder, when I see things like this, if the Brits think doing away with the death penalty was a good thing.

Stop the ACLU notes that even the NYT is a bit miffed at Obama's naked cronyism in choosing ambassadors.

Peace through superior firepower at Ace of Spades HQ. It beats the hell out of the M203 Grenade Launcher.

At A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, there is a fascinating discussion of ancient coinage and economies.

Darwinism proven in the negative at the Whited Sepulchre.