POLL: 71% of Voters Don't Trust Sotomayer to judge fairly

The opportunity on Sotomayor, part II

from Hot Air.com
June 3, 2009
by Ed Morrissey

Last week, I wrote that the Republicans have an opportunity with the Sonia Sotomayor nomination not to conduct filibusters or fire-breathing sermons, but to calmly and dispassionately demonstrate that neither she nor Barack Obama represent the opinions of the majority of Americans on identity politics. A new Quinnipiac poll underscores that opportunity. A majority of voters across a wide swath of demographics oppose affirmative action and race- and gender-based setasides in government, education, and academia:

American voters say 55 - 36 percent that affirmative action should be abolished, and disagree 71 - 19 percent with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayer’s ruling in the New Haven firefighters’ case, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

More than 70 percent of voters say diversity is not a good enough reason to give minorities preferential treatment in competition for government or private sector jobs, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University survey of more than 3,000 voters finds.

This poll brings good news to those who want to see a color-blind society. For the most part, all demographics favor protections for the disabled, but not for ethnicity and gender:

•Support 55 - 39 percent affirmative action for the disabled in hiring, promotions and college admissions. Protestants and Catholics support it, 49 - 46 percent and 49 - 47 percent, respectively. Jews also support it 59 - 25 percent;

•Oppose 70 - 25 percent giving some racial groups preference for government jobs to increase diversity. Black voters support it 49 - 45 percent while Hispanic voters are opposed 58 - 38 percent;

•Oppose 74 - 21 percent giving some racial groups preference for private sector jobs to increase diversity. Voters in every racial and religious group oppose this;

•Oppose 64 - 29 percent affirmative action for Hispanics in hiring, promotion and college entry. Black voters support it 59 - 30 percent while Hispanics split 47 - 48 percent;

•Oppose 61 - 33 percent affirmative action for blacks in hiring, promotion and college entry. Black voters support this 69 - 26 percent, as do Hispanics 51 - 46 percent;

•Oppose 62 - 32 percent affirmative action for white women in hiring, promotion and college entry. Women oppose this 58 - 35 percent but blacks support it 55 - 37 percent.

This puts Sotomayor and Obama in a narrow group that still favors preferential treatment and outcome-based policies. Republicans should see this as the real goal of the confirmation hearings - to communicate this to the entire electorate. As the poll demonstrates, it entails almost no risk and a large potential upside.

But in order to make that argument, they need to stick to rational arguments based on Sotomayor’s own words and her decisions, especially on Ricci. The GOP needs to avoid the inflammatory personal insults and the demand for obstructionism and focus on the fight they can win. Most Americans will agree that a President has the prerogative to get his judicial appointments a fair vote, at the very least. That doesn’t mean Republicans have to vote to confirm Sotomayor, but a filibuster won’t work, and a failed attempt will make the GOP look even more impotent.

In this case, Republicans represent the majority of Americans. They have a great opportunity to use the confirmation hearings as a stage to demonstrate that, as well as demonstrate their readiness not just to oppose Obama but to prove themselves trustworthy enough for leadership in DC.
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Is Obama's Supreme Court Pick a Racist?

This is a great one!

Obama’s End Run on the Second Amendment

The Supreme Court nominee is a gun-banning radical who has ruled that cities and states can disarm you.

from Pajamas Media
May 28, 2009
by Bob Owens

Long before he was the president of the United States or even the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama made his opposition to the Second Amendment of the Constitution painfully clear. As a director of the Joyce Foundation for eight years (1994-2002), Obama participated in the creation and funding of prohibitionist-minded anti-gun groups to the tune of millions of dollars. This fact does not surprise the millions of Americans who have responded to the threat by purchasing millions of firearms since the president was elected and who purchased at least 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition in December alone.

What far fewer Americans know about Obama is that he was one of the Joyce Foundation’s directors when they embarked on a plot to undermine the Second Amendment by targeting the Supreme Court of the United States:

The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend. …

The Joyce directorate’s plan almost succeeded. The individual rights view won out in the Heller Supreme Court appeal, but only by 5-4. The four dissenters were persuaded in part by Joyce-funded writings, down to relying on an article which misled them on critical historical documents.

Having lost that fight, Obama now claims he always held the individual rights view of the Second Amendment, and that he “respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.” But as a Joyce director, Obama was involved in a wealthy foundation’s attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court, buy legal scholarship, and obliterate the individual right to arms.

Voters who value the Constitution should ask whether someone who was party to that plan should be nominating future Supreme Court justices.

Voters, however, were all but completely unaware of the Joyce Foundation director’s attempt to undermine the Constitution and voted the unvetted candidate into the White House. Just more than seven months after Hardy’s warning, Obama stands on the brink of succeeding where he once failed, by nominating an anti-gun radical appellate judge by the name of Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court.

Ken Blackwell was among the first to sound the alarm on Sotomayor’s radical view of the Second Amendment and the threat her views pose to the Constitution.

The recent landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller put an end to decades of arguments regarding the meaning of the Second Amendment. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS rejected the collectivist interpretation favored by gun control advocates such as President Obama, noting that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right of citizens to own firearms for private use is an individual right that predates the Constitution, with its authority tied directly to the natural right of self-defense.

Just six months after Heller, however, Sotomayor issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo that the protections of the Second Amendment do not apply to the states, and that if your city or state wants to ban all guns, then they have the right to disarm you. Such an opinion seems to fly directly in the face of Heller, exposing Sotomayor as an anti-gun radical who will affirm full-on gun prohibitions and believes that you have no right to own a firearm, even for the most basic right of defending your family in your own home.

Maloney has now been appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case on June 26. If confirmed, Sotomayor would almost certainly have to recuse herself from Maloney, but her views that made her such an attractive candidate to an anti-gun president would be involved in deciding similar cases appealed to the court.

While at the Joyce Foundation, Obama failed in the organization’s plot to corrupt Second Amendment legal scholarship and undermine the decision-making processes of the Supreme Court. Now president, only a concerted effort by America’s gun owners may keep an anti-gun activist judge from claiming a seat on the Court itself.

After Heller, the ever-changing candidate Obama affirmed the individualist view supported by a growing majority of Americans and sought to reassure America’s gun owners that he was not about to disarm them. By nominating an activist judge who holds a radically different view, Obama’s affirmation has proven to be yet another promise with a short shelf life.
Media pundits and Beltway insiders alike are predicting Sotomayor will be confirmed by the Senate and take her seat on the Supreme Court.

American gun owners who elected pro-gun Democrats and Republicans to the Senate may decide to make an issue of Sotomayor’s radical prohibitionist views. If they do, that tide could just as soon turn quickly against her, ending her hopes of ruling against the rights of Americans to defend their families from the nation’s highest court.
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Obama prefers a Justice who will violate their oath of office...

Empathy vs. Impartiality - When they conflict, the Supreme Court must choose the latter.

from The National Review
By Jonah Goldberg
May 27, 2009

Why make this complicated?

President Obama prefers Supreme Court justices who will violate their oath of office. And he hopes Sonia Sotomayor is the right Hispanic woman for the job. Here’s the oath Supreme Court justices must take:

“I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as (title) under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”

Contrast that with Obama’s insistence that the “quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” is the key qualification for a Supreme Court justice. According to White House talking points, Judge Sotomayor’s “American story” of humble origins — she was raised in the South Bronx — best prepares her for the high court because it shows “she understands that upholding the rule of law means going beyond legal theory to ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts.”

Obama says law and precedent should determine rulings in “95 percent of the cases,” but in the really hard and important cases, justices should go with their heart. “In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

Now, keep in mind that 5 percent of Supreme Court cases isn’t everything, but it’s nearly 100 percent of what we argue about as a country. For the hard cases Americans care most about, Obama says empathy should rule.

So, what’s wrong with empathy?

Well, nothing. Empathy is a fine thing, and all decent people should employ it, including Supreme Court justices.

But Obama has something specific in mind when he talks about empathy. He wants the justice’s oath to in effect be rewritten. Judges must administer justice with respect to persons, they must be partial to the poor, and so on.

I don’t think this is open to much debate. When Obama voted against Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation, he said that Roberts didn’t have the “heart” to vote the right way in those 5 percent of cases. Rather than Roberts the Cruel, Obama explained, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” Cue Sotomayor the Empathic.

The reasoning here is a riot of dubious assumptions. Obama and Sotomayor both assume that a firsthand understanding of the plight of the poor or the African-American or the gay or the old will automatically result in justices voting a certain (liberal) way. “I would hope,” Sotomayor said in 2001, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” This is not only deeply offensive, it is also nonsense on stilts. Clarence Thomas understands what it is like to be poor and black better than any justice who has ever sat on the bench. How’s that working out for liberals?

Of course, liberals say that if you don’t agree with their policy prescriptions on, say, racial quotas or abortion, it’s because you don’t care as much as they do about minorities or women. Which is why they’ve demonized Thomas as a villainous race-traitor. This, too, is aggressively stupid. But even if it were true, why are we talking about policy preferences and the courts? Judges aren’t supposed to have policy preferences, despite Ms. Sotomayor’s insistence that the courts are “where policy is made.”

More important, who says conservatives are against judicial empathy? I, for one, am all for it. I’m for empathy for the party most deserving of justice before the Supreme Court, within the bounds of the law and Constitution. If that means siding with a poor black man, great. If that means siding with a rich white one, that’s great too. The same holds for gays and gun owners, single mothers and media conglomerates. We should all rejoice when justices fulfill their oaths and give everyone a fair hearing, even if that’s now out of fashion in the age of Obama.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
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Dear President Obama: You're kidding.... right? Comrade Sotomayor for Supreme Court

Sotomayor is also very ant-gun. She believes the Bill of Rights actually makes it illegal for ordinary citizens to own guns. So not only are we a "Nation of Cowards," we are also a nation of "Gun Carrying Criminals."
Rees

from Dear Mr. President
May 26, 2009

VIDEO: Sotomayor on the court: 'Where policy is made'...Sotomayor: 'I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male'...Prospect's Résumé...
Self described 'Newyorican'...
MAG: The Case Against...
NBC: Would Republicans dare vote against first Hispanic Woman?
McConnell: 'Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record'...NO BIG OPINIONS ON ABORTION...

Look, Mr. President... I GET that you're very big on affirmative action, given what it's done for you... but this is absurd.

You actually WANT to appoint a Justice that directly violates judicial tenets by believing and acting on the concept of usurping legislative prerogative by making "policy" from the bench?

Once again, you've managed to frighten and disgust me.

Well done.
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