Sotomayor's Selective Empathy

The Sotomayor confirmation is a done deal. Obama and his press lackeys have mau mau'd conservatives into cowering silence. All that's left is to look at her record.

The cultural issues and the controversial quotes create an interesting swirl, but I think Supreme Court nominees should be judged on their judicial record, so I'd like to hear more about that. Word from some legal people is that she is an intellectual lightweight, and they point to her facile rulings and the paucity of well-written opinions. The woman apparently rarely explains herself or her legal reasoning. I'd like to see critics focus on that.

The greatest irony of all in my opinion, is how this "up from the bootstraps" woman, in a fit of zero empathy, summarily quashed the promotion of "up from the bootstraps" firefighter Frank Ricci.

The dyslexic high school graduate spent thousands of dollars and off-duty hours studying for promotion to lieutenant. He and 17 others made the grade, but all promotions were thrown out because, despite the cultural sensitivity of the test, not enough African Americans qualified.

Judge Sotomayor upheld a lower court ruling that the city did not discriminate because it denied all promotions, not just Ricci's. Worse, she didn't even explain her ruling, raising the legal ire of fellow Hispanic Appeals Court Judge Jose Cabranes, who successfully got the case before the Supreme Court, where experts expect Ricci will finally be vindicated. David Paul Kuhn writes about the case in detail at RCP. I highly recommend it.

Sotomayor's juicy quotes and the left's social engineering cry our for sensible rebuttal, but conservatives will win no battles in such rocky terrain. Better to pull an Oprah.

Senate Republicans should focus on her judicial record and invite Fireman Ricci to testify at the hearing. A brave Republican could even attempt to pull a reverse-Oprah double-ironic twist by mentioning how Frank Ricci grew up in a gritty working class neighborhood of New Haven while just a few miles away Sonia Sotomayor earned her law degree within the ivied walls of Yale.

Hopefully, Ricci's a manly, telegenic, workaday hunk who will garner empathy from men and women in the middle who are otherwise uninterested in such boring subjects. Maybe then ordinary folk will pause to contemplate just who we are vesting with the robes of justice.

RCP - Kuhn
TNR - Rosen
New Ledger - Yousefzadeh