Mendacious and Unfair Attacks on Sonia Sotomayor: Stuart Taylor, Jr. 's Meshugannah Entry
As I have said before, nobody who wants to please The One Who Is has any business paying even a single red cent cent to the National Journal for any purpose as long as Stuart Taylor, Jr., writes for it. For we all remember that, to its eternal shame and disgrace, National Journal did not fire Stuart Taylor after he denounced our NATO allies for being "already in an overwrought tizzy about the supposed mistreatment of the 158 detainees at Guantanamo Bay...".
Not to mention things like:
The perception that the Bush administration has systematically denied due process to the more than 650 alleged "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay has both shocked Americans who care about the rule of law, me included, and done America enormous damage in world opinion. But... the administration has made a plausible case that its process for deciding whether to send prisoners to Guantanamo... has far more rigorous safeguards than had previously been disclosed...
And:
I am rooting for Bush to go down in history as a great president.... How can we not root for Bush to win this campaign for Arab democracy?... [S]houldn't we sometime Bush-bashers -- and even the full-time Bush-haters -- be prepared to give great credit to him and his neocons, if and when it becomes clear that they have engineered a historic breakthrough?... [N]o matter how shallow, slippery, and smug Bush sometimes seems, if he ends up changing the world for the better, he will be entitled to a presumption of wisdom, even brilliance...
Now Stuart Taylor, Jr., is back!
Sonia Sotomayor said:
[O]ur gender and our national origins may and will make a difference in our judgingh. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the sme conclusion.... I am not so sure that i agree with that statement.... I hope that a wise Latina woman the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life. Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo... upheld both sex and race discrimination.... [W]e should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values nad needs of people from a different group.... [N]ine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions....
However, a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further.... I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some....
Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I... owe [people] constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions, and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences...
And here is what Stuart Taylor does with that speech:
Identity Politics And Sotomayor: [This] remarkable speech... deserves more scrutiny... Democratic Party's powerful identity-politics wing... seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.... [H]er basic proposition... white males... inferior to all other groups.... [A]ny prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.... [T]he president's emphasis on selective "empathy" for preferred racial and other groups as "the criteria by which I'll be selecting my judges" is not encouraging.... Do we want a new justice who comes close to stereotyping white males as (on average) inferior beings? And who seems to speak with more passion about her ethnicity and gender than about the ideal of impartiality? Compare Sotomayor's celebration of "how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul" and reflections "on being a Latina voice on the bench" with Judge Learned Hand's eulogy for Justice Benjamin Cardozo in 1938.... Some see such talk as tiresome dead-white-male stuff, from a time when almost all judges were white males.... I see it as the essence of what judges should strive to be.... [E]ven if a devotee of identity politics fills retiring Justice David Souter's seat, she will not have enough votes to encourage greater use of such racial preferences. Not yet.
It is an interesting question whether Taylor's holding up Cardozo as the just judge and thus hinting in the context of Sotomayor's speech that Cardozo's judgments upholding of race and sex discrimination were rightly decided is unintentional--due to his rhetorical incompetence--or is intentional. I am undecided on this question.
