I hope our activist Executive and activist Congress get an activist Judiciary to balance them.  I also hope to hear loads and loads of crap about Original Intent, Living Constitution, and all sorts of other things that sound like breakfast cereal propaganda: “Uncle Sam! For a Living Constitution as Originally Intended! Eat it in your Robe!”

Obama will get a liberal judge who isn’t liberal enough, conservatives in the Senate will gripe and probably stonewall this for a month or two, and we’ll all be better off in the end because we didn’t elect a conservative nutjob again.

NPR is announcing that Obama will pick Sotomayor.

Obama will get a liberal judge who isn’t liberal enough, conservatives in the Senate will gripe and probably stonewall this for a month or two,

Don’t forget - it will be the worst betrayal of the Republic EVAH!!, a sure sign that the USA is doomed, and that both Obama and whoever he picked are traitors.

I would so dearly love to see him announce his nomination of Ward Churchill and keep a straight face for a minute or two, just in the hopes of wingtnuts having aneurysm…

Part of the problem lies in these facts:

>>  Obama is a ConLaw prof.

>>  Obama is a patient man.

>>  This president is what is called a “centrist” with some progressive and some right-wing leanings. 

>> Being a so-called “centrist” places him in the “centre” of the Beltway and of the Dem leadership, but considerably to the right of most Dem voters and most policy positions of Americans in general [take the environment, health care and Wall Street for just three things].

What do these factors come together to produce?  A President who wants to appoint a so-called reasonable centrist rather than a progressive or leftist Alito or Roberts.  He’s patient; he wants to ratchet down the rhetoric and partisanship of the current court and produce a more balanced, less extremist court which attorns to his notions of reasonable centrism and compromise.

Is this the correct path?  No.  When a game is being played between one man who has either four or eight years to get the job done and another who has twenty or thirty years to do so, the 4-8 man who plays the “patient” game is a fool, no matter how intelligent he is.  To use a sparring metaphor, Obama is playing touch-and-points against an opponent who is playing full contact.  Alito and Roberts were full-bore partisan picks designed to last for decades, a successful attempt to swing the court radically to the right.  The only solution is to produce a court as quickly as one can which pulls strongly back to the left, and that is so even if your goal is just to move the pendulum back to the centre.

Right now the court has four members who are arguably of the extreme judicial right.  Not the libertarian right (though Thomas, oddly enough, sometimes plays that role), but the conservative right.  It is grossly unrepresentative of the American population and the bar in general, and stands roughly for the notion that Harvard, Yale, the Federalist Society and Wall Street are the ONLY reference points that matter in American society.  They’ve even shown that messing with elections and the right to vote are OIYAR.  The only viable response is to start hard pushback, and now.

But he won’t. 

Personally, I think that Obama is making the same key error that Clinton did early in his first term: being so used to find middle ground he is unused to people who don’t even concede that others might have a valid viewpoint, let alone a viewpoint that might be taken into account.

It will also provide a great lead-in when one of Obama’s nominees is filibustered by 40 Republicans and Ben Nelson for being an “activist”, because the only thing the average person will know about Obama’s nominee is that they made a controversial anti-Christian ruling.

I hate this public perception that “Christian” is just one big, homogeneous group.  There are many liberal Christians, who support abortion rights, marriage equality, contraception, etc., and who opposed the Iraq war.  I wish that extremist Christians would stop acting like they hold the true Christian views, and I wish that liberal Christians could feel more comfortable about expressing their opinions.  When a judge makes a ruling that goes against the “values” of extremists, that judge is not being anti-Christian.  That judge is being anti-extremist Christian.

Haven’t they gotten with the clue yet?  A bunch of these folks are “straminies” ... people who are rumored to be on the “short list” but aren’t on any list at all.  The Obama White House is pretty famous for letting the media make it’s own lists and dither about those when they aren’t even close to any real list.

Sotomayor is a Catholic.  Does anyone know if she’s decided anything vis-a-vis choice?

Let’s assume that Sotomayor is approved.  That means that Catholics (who are 23.9% of the US population, according to CIA) will have 66% of the Supreme Court seats: her; Roberts; Alito; Kennedy; Scalia and Thomas are all RC.

Does that make sense to anybody?????????

Oh, but upholding the constitution against religious extremists attempting to force their whacked view on others or get federal funding for stupid is “anti-Christian” doncha know?

It will also provide a great lead-in when one of Obama’s nominees is filibustered by 40 Republicans and Ben Nelson for being an “activist”

I’m not too worried about that happening.  Despite what the rightwing punditocracy is gonna spout over the next two months about Sotomayor, the early verdict is that she’s gonna be a slam dunk in the confirmation process.  The two female GOP senators from Maine are already sounding like they’re on board, which would kill the possibility of a filibuster.  Additionally, 8 current Republican senators voted for her confirmation to the Circuit Court back in 1998 (nine, if you throw in Specter), and she even got the votres of Jesse Helms and Rick Santorum at the time.

Unless they wish to lose the Hispanic vote forever, the Senate Republican Caucus would be incredibly stupid to try to actually stop Sotomayor’s confirmation.

On top of all of this, and regardless of however douchebags like Erik Ericsson try to characterize her, everything I’ve read about her indicates that she’s really not a particularly liberal judge and actually is pretty centrist (more centrist than I would have liked) in her legal philosophy.

That means that Catholics (who are 23.9% of the US population, according to CIA) will have 66% of the Supreme Court seats

I blame the Jesuits

Jesse, we can get you a nail gun. I’d offer to lend you mine, but after the next couple of months of this crap I’m not sure I’ll be physically capable of mailing it to you.

Unless they wish to lose the Hispanic vote forever, the Senate Republican Caucus would be incredibly stupid to try to actually stop Sotomayor’s confirmation.

You mean incredibly stupid as publicly kowtowing to Limbaugh or incredibly stupid like being willing to allow the banking system to collapse or incredibly stupid to elect Michael Steele or incredibly stupid….

Eh, different day, same stupid.

incredibly stupid to elect Michael Steele

Actually, despite what a monumental clown he’s become, at the time, I thought the GOP made the smarter choice in picking Michael Steele, given the alternative - electing Caton Dawson, a southern white male Republican who belonged to an all-white country club and said he joined the Republican Party in opposition to bussing desegregation in the 1970s.

DTG:

Kay, you win that one.  How about:  ‘...being incredibly stupid enough to have only Dawson and Steele to choose from.’

And we haven’t even started on Sara Palin and Joe the effin (non)Plumber.  Shorter answer:  Yes, they can be that stupid.  Whom the Gods would destroy the first make <strike>mad</strike> stupid.

From a conservative commenter:

As a conservative lawyer, I’m fine with this pick. As far as appellate judges go, Sotomayor is generally undistinguished. She’s a political pick designed to appeal to an interest group. Obama has 59, practically 60 seats in the Senate, and he could have named a strong, dynamic liberal who would have been a game-changer (even if only taking Souter’s seat). He didn’t.

Says it all, doesn’t it?  Obama ... could have named a strong, dynamic liberal who would have been a game-changer .... He didn’t.

[Source: ]http://volokh.com/posts/1243349566.shtml]

DTG:

Kay, you win that one.  How about:  ‘...being incredibly stupid enough to have only Dawson and Steele to choose from.’

And we haven’t even started on Sara Palin and Joe the effin (non)Plumber.  Shorter answer:  Yes, they can be that stupid.  Whom the Gods would destroy the first make mad stupid.

Don’t get me wrong… after the shenanigans of the past few years, I’ll never underestimate the ability of the RNC, the NRSC, and the Republican Party in general to shoot itself in the foot at any given opportunity.

That said, I think there’s at least some sense of awareness going on inside the NRSC on their current standing, given that they immediately came out and endorsed Charlie Crist for Senate last week, despite the fact that he’s gonna be challenged from the wingnut reactionary right pretty fiercely by Rubio.  They recognized, astutely, that Crist was their most electable candidate in that race (and sadly, if he can win the GOP primary, he’s probably a lock in the general against any Democrat because he’s widely viewed as a moderate centrist).

Based on the murmurs of the punditocracy, I think Sotomayor’s confirmation is gonna go down like this… the Senate Republicans will make some minor grumblings about her, but never actually attempt a filibuster.  Whilst the Limbaughs and Coulters are so completely tone deaf that they’ll scream and holler all the way through, the NRSC will recognize that not only do they not have the votes to attempt an actual filibuster (I don’t think Snowe or Collins will go along with it), but that if they protest too much, they risk even further alienating the Hispanic vote than they already have in the past few years.  Unlike the African-American vote, which they have long since written off, the Hispanic vote was still in play as recently as 2004, as Bush, for god knows what reason, enjoyed a fairly decent amount of support from that bloc.  Obama just took 2/3 of the Hispanic vote this past year, and with this nomination will likely only gain on that demographic.  The Republicans know that if the Democrats can get to a point of winning 80% of the Hispanic vote or more, they’ll be unstoppable for decades.  I think they realize that if they protest this nominee too much, they risk losing Hispanics for generations.

I certainly hope that the Senate GOP members act as petulant and whiny as possible during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, and I won’t say that it’s impossible, but I do think that she’s gonna sail through fairly easily.  It would be great if the GOP does decide to commit total party suicide by making too much stink about her nomination, however.

The crucial thing to remember about this is that Sotomayor is highly unlikely to be Obama’s only supreme court pick. Even barring a blissfully fortunate accident or two, he’s probably going to get one or two more. And quite possibly with a less ridiculous senate.

Well, DTG, you may be right.  After all, this nominee doesn’t really change the balance of the Court, only maintains it.  It won’t change unless the Dems have the opportunity to replace Scalia or Thomas.

However, my hopes are up.  After all, there is always Richard Shelby.  Rush is already proclaiming her a “racist.”  Pat Buchanan is calling her an “affirmative action” choice.  Some times they can’t help themselves, they really can’t.