"President Barack Obama named federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice on Tuesday." Thus read the headline... isn't that an oddly worded sentence from a "professional journalist". Will Sotomayor ultimately be appointed to the (apparently) newly-established "Hispanic Supreme Court"? And will this Hispanic Supreme Court only hear Hispanic cases? (History recorded the last Hispanic Supreme Court in the 1400's. It was led by a man named Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.) Will the oral arguments before this court be presented in Hisp, instead of English?
Commenting upon her official nomination this morning, "My heart today is bursting with gratitude," Sotomayor said from the White House podium moments after being introduced by Obama.
Personally, I would have said something more like "My heart is bursting with pride." I checked Wal-Mart and Safeway to see what the per pound cost of Political Plums was today. Everlasting "gratitude" (and implied support) seemed to be the going price. The less competent the recipient of the Political Plum, the more gratitude was expected as payment. And we should certainly focus that political "blind eye" on the fact that Sotomayor is one of, if not the, most overturned federal judges by the Supreme Court.
As for the impartiality that one would expect from a justice of SCOTUS, here's what Sotomayor had to say about that a few years go: “Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” [U.C. Berkeley School of Law, 10/26/2001]
Sometimes it's a shame that we are a "nation of laws" instead of a nation of JUSTICE, as we once were... before the laws were made horrifically more complex by "learned and scholarly men". Men whose primary objective was to insure that, in time of legal difficulties, it would be necessary to retain the services of their associates!
Yeah... I could be wrong about this, but I seriously doubt it.
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