Tag: Sotomayor

The Al Franken show


I’ve been quite skeptical about Al Franken’s arrival in the U.S. Senate, concerned about the way he entered the race and about some of the positions he had taken early in his candidacy. I also was concerned that he would not be taken seriously.

His opening statement at Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, already has gone a long way toward alleviating some of my concerns.

Here is the relevant passage:

First, I believe the position of Congress with respect to the Courts and the Executive is in jeopardy. Even before I aspired to represent the people of Minnesota in the United States Senate, I believed that the Framers made Congress the first branch of government for a reason. It answers most directly to the people and has the legitimacy to speak for the people in crafting laws to be carried out by the executive branch.

I am wary of judicial activism and I believe in judicial restraint. Except under the most exceptional circumstances, the judicial branch is designed to show deep deference to Congress and not make policy by itself.

Yet looking at recent decisions on voting rights, campaign finance reform, and a number of other topics, it appears that appropriate deference may not have been shown in the past few years – and there are ominous signs that judicial activism is on the rise in these areas.

I agree with Senator Feingold and Senator Whitehouse that we hear a lot about judicial activism when politicians talk about what kind of judge they want in the Supreme Court. But it seems that their definition of an activist judge is one who votes differently than they would like. Because during the Rhenquist Court, Justice Clarence Thomas voted to overturn federal laws more than Justices Stevens and Breyer combined.

Second, I am concerned that Americans are facing new barriers to defending their individual rights. The Supreme Court is the last court in the land where an individual is promised a level playing field and can seek to right a wrong:

  • It is the last place an employee can go if he or she is discriminated against because of age, gender, or color.
  • It is the last place a small business owner can go to ensure free and fair competition in the market.
  • It is the last place an investor can go to try to recover losses from securities fraud.
  • It is the last place a person can go to protect the free flow of information on the internet.
  • It is the last place a citizen can go to protect his or her vote.
  • It is the last place where a woman can go to protect her reproductive health and rights.

Yet from what I see, on each of those fronts, for each of those rights, the
past decade has made it a little bit harder for American citizens to defend
themselves.

As far as opening statements go, Sen. Franken’s shows he plans to be serious, that his chief concern will be the people — as opposed to the money interests — and that places him in stark contrast with most of his colleagues.

This sense of responsibility to the constitution has been evident in his questioning, as well, and stands in stark contrast to the race-based rhetoric of a GOP that seems still to be fighting the culture wars of the early Bush administration.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The race question and the judiciary

The hearings concerning Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, are a bit anticlimactic — as Sen. Lindsay Graham pointed out the other day — but that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party from descending into the pit of racial and ethnic bigotry.

In their attempt to hobble the nominee, painting a comment she made about how our personal histories affect our ability to respond to information, they have betrayed their own biases and the party’s retrenchment into an apartheid of irrelevance.

Consider the repeated references to other Hispanic judges and nominees, especially the failed Bush appointee Miguel Estrada — as if all Hispanic nominees are judged to be the same and support for one automatically insulates a senator from charges of racism.

The most salient commentary on the first two days of hearings came from Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post in his Tuesday column — written before yesterday’s Estrada-fest:

Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.

The whole point of Sotomayor’s much-maligned “wise Latina” speech was that everyone has a unique personal history — and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident. I don’t see how a political party that refuses to accept this basic principle of diversity can hope to prosper, given that soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority in this country.

We are one people, but we have different vantage points. That the GOP refuses to acknowledge this is something destined to condemn them to historical irrelevance.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.