In the News
Jun 22, 2009 |
Roll Call
Senate Republicans are expected to begin formally making their case against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court on Tuesday with a series of speeches questioning her involvement in a Puerto Rican civil rights group and her positions on a number of legal issues, Republican aides said Monday.
Jun 22, 2009 |
Huffington Post
Nearly a month after she was nominated, Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation for the Supreme Court is about as close to a sure thing as the Obama White House could have hoped for. The Court of Appeal's Judge has had few hiccups -- certainly little of note -- since her name was put forward following Justice David Souter's resignation. Republicans in the Senate, meanwhile, have exhibited little political will to attack the first Hispanic nominee for the Court
Jun 22, 2009 |
National Law Journal
Judge Sonia Sotomayor regularly sends her law clerks to the records office at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit. There, they gather up the entire history of cases on which Sotomayor is writing an opinion or dissent — all the motions in limine, the briefs on summary judgment, everything that came up from the district court.
Jun 17, 2009 |
RollCall.com
Senate Judiciary ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is expected to give the first in a series of floor speeches today outlining the GOP’s vision for the judiciary and the kind of judges his party believes are qualified for the Supreme Court, committee sources said.
Jun 16, 2009 |
Legal Times
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, today recalled the opposition to Marshall in the context of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Court.
In a speech at the University of the District of Columbia's law school, Leahy said that some of the criticisms of Sotomayor have been "shameless" and "wrong." He didn't name any opponents, but he singled out the comment — made by former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) — that Sotomayor was a member of a "Latino KKK."
Jun 16, 2009 |
Washington Times
Judge Sonia Sotomayor's open-book life has been a story of overcoming challenges, from an underprivileged upbringing in the Bronx to struggles against perceived discrimination to a mammoth battle against a mischievous cricket outside her Princeton dorm-room window.
Thanks to her prolific writing and speechmaking, all of which she had to submit to the Senate Judiciary Committee as she awaits hearings on her Supreme Court nomination, every detail is there for senators to read, down to her days wearing a bulletproof vest while she was on the clock for the Manhattan district attorney's office and to her teenage dating strategy -- when she and a cousin fended off each other's parents.
What emerges from the judge's very personal speaking and writing is a portrait of a woman who grew up in what she calls the "cocoon" of the Puerto Rican enclave of the Bronx, who faced serious self-doubts about whether she was up for the grueling educational path she had chosen and who is consumed with melding her Latina identity with the role assigned her as a high-level federal judge.
Jun 16, 2009 |
NYTimes.com
Many conservatives opposed to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court have argued that she is opposed to gun rights, a view based largely on a New York case in which she took part this year.
Jun 15, 2009 |
Forbes
Sonya Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court--which, if confirmed, will make her the first Hispanic and the third woman U.S. Supreme Court Justice--already has prompted the kind of belittling and stereotypical comments (such as "not that smart" and "domineering") that frequently are leveled at outsiders, mainly women, who seek a place in white-male preserves.
Jun 15, 2009 |
Huffington Post
Several weeks after Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, former Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato wrote an op-ed endorsing a bipartisan approach to filling the vacancy. The template, he wrote, should be the collaborative work he and fellow New Yorker Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, took towards picking federally appointed judges -- including Sonia Sotomayor.
Jun 15, 2009 |
New York Times
That is not to say that Judge Sotomayor is inattentive to questions of racial discrimination. In Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, for example, she dissented from the majority’s ruling that a school’s favorable treatment of white students could not prove that a young black student who was demoted to a lower grade was the victim of discrimination. In Hayden v. Pataki, she concluded that felon disenfranchisement laws are discriminatory and violate the Voting Rights Act.
Her decisions in these cases would hardly make her an extremist. The now notorious Ricci v. DeStefano was a genuinely tough call. Yes, the firefighter plaintiffs had a serious claim that they suffered discrimination when the city refused to apply a promotion test they passed. But the city argued that it feared a lawsuit by minority firefighters alleging that the city’s promotion tests unintentionally discriminated against blacks and Hispanics. A ruling in the city’s favor was not necessarily ideological.
The public debate ought to be about what the law should command in these kinds of difficult cases. Unsubstantiated charges of racism distract us from these questions and demeans our justice system.
Jun 14, 2009 |
Associated Press
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says it's too early to talk about supporting or opposing Sonia Sotomayor. But he says blocking her nomination to the Supreme Court with a filibuster is an option.
Jun 14, 2009 |
San Diego Union-Tribune
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is angry at Democrats for speeding up the start of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings – to July 13.
“They want the shortest confirmation timeline in recent memory for someone with the longest record in recent memory,” McConnell said. “This violates basic standards of fairness, and it prevents senators from carrying out one of their most solemn duties, a thorough review of the president's nominee to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land.”
What gall for anyone associated with the Republican Party, much less one of its leaders, to talk about “fairness” and “solemn duties” given how conservatives have reacted to the Sotomayor nomination.
Jun 14, 2009 |
Associated Press
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has bonded with female senators about her childhood love of Nancy Drew mysteries and shared war stories with the Senate's former prosecutors about her days in the gritty Manhattan district attorney's office.
Slogging through dozens of personal, one-on-one meetings with senators that amount to a high-stakes job interview, she has impressed her questioners with an engaging personality and life story - even those lawmakers with big reservations about her views on the law.
Jun 12, 2009 |
National Journal
If confirmed for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor will be one of the most qualified justices -- though not the most qualified -- and likely as liberal as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That's the hunch coming from Jeffrey Segal, a political science professor at Stony Brook University who combs newspaper editorials to rank justices on their perceived qualifications and ideology…
"She's going to fall as a moderate liberal," Segal predicts. "There will be evidence that she's not a doctrinaire. And she'll come out pretty high on the qualifications, but not at the very, very top."
Jun 11, 2009 |
Los Angeles Times
Among the charges leveled by some conservatives against Sotomayor is that she has been insufficiently protective of the 2nd Amendment, which says that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Exhibit A was the judge's role in a decision by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the constitutionality of a New York state law banning the possession of nunchucks.
Sotomayor and two other judges ruled that the 2nd Amendment applies only to the federal government, a long-standing view that the Supreme Court didn't address when it struck down a gun control law in Washington, D.C., last year. In legal jargon, the high court hasn't explicitly "incorporated” the 2nd Amendment in the 14th Amendment, which protects "liberty" against state interference. Other amendments long have been incorporated, making it possible to sue the states for violating many of the protections of the Bill of Rights.
Jun 11, 2009 |
TIME
Of the thousands of cases Sonia Sotomayor has heard during nearly 17 years on the federal bench, the one likely to raise the toughest questions during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which begin on July 13, involves affirmative action. In 2007 Sotomayor, as a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, heard arguments in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano.
Jun 11, 2009 |
The Associated Press
Republicans accused Democrats Wednesday of moving too hastily on Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination, warning that the decision could imperil her confirmation as they pressed the judge for more documents from her past.
The top Senate Republican blasted Democrats' decision to schedule mid-July hearings for Sotomayor's confirmation, while another senior GOP senator floated the possibility of a filibuster by angry Republicans against President Barack Obama's first high court nominee.
Jun 11, 2009 |
Roll Call
White House officials are orchestrating the efforts of Vice President Joseph Biden, Senate Democrats and outside organizations to ensure confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor by the August recess, as Republicans search for comfortable ground from which to fight the nomination.
Jun 10, 2009 |
New York Times
Judge Sonia Sotomayor once described herself as “a product of affirmative action” who was admitted to two Ivy League schools despite scoring lower on standardized tests than many classmates, which she attributed to “cultural biases” that are “built into testing…”
Those comments were among a trove of videos dating back nearly 25 years that shed new light on Judge Sotomayor’s views. She provided the videos to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week as it prepares for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing next month.
Jun 10, 2009 |
New York Times
Senate Republicans on Wednesday stepped up their complaints that Judge Sonia Sotomayor submitted incomplete responses to the written questionnaire in connection with her nomination to the Supreme Court.
A half-dozen Republicans, including Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the party’s senior member of the Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Judge Sotomayor urging her to fill in the gaps. Among other requests, they demanded that she provide copies of the Yale Law Journal, of which she was an editor, and also that she clarify her role on the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group in New York.
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