President Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he would be nominating federal judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill Justice David Souter’s open seat on the Supreme Court. Just about every news source – the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, to name just a few – will tell you that, if confirmed by the Senate, Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic judge to sit on the highest court in the land.
While it is certainly exciting for someone of her singular upbringing to be even nominated, it does us little good to throw around superlatives. After all, that is not what being judicious is all about. There is even an argument to be made (as other publications such as the Wall Street Journal have vocalized) that Benjamin Cardozo, who served on the Court from 1932-1938, may have descended from Portuguese Jews and would technically count as the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic descent. Fair enough.
But as a practical matter, Sotomayor’s ethnicity will not affect her confirmation. Assume it will even bear strongly on how she will cast decisions and pen opinions, as she has famously said it should. Such considerations are, politically speaking, largely irrelevant to the question of her confirmation.
As soon as Minnesota Senator elect Al Franken is seated – and he will be seated – the Democratic Party will control a supermajority in the Senate. That is a voting block powerful enough to invoke cloture to break any Republican filibuster, while having plenty left over for the simple majority required to vote her in. Dems also control the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducts the confirmation hearings, twelve to seven. It would be more or less fruitless to speculate about scenarios where this voting block is not completely behind Barack Obama and his nomination. Barring some shocking revelation or similar game-changer, the likelihood of Sotomayor not being confirmed is negligible.
So then what is so important about her ethnicity? Perhaps it is important to people because they want to call attention to something that makes them happy, excited or proud. Fair enough.
But to ascribe anything more than symbolic or nostalgic importance to her ethnicity, once we have ruled out its relevance to the political realities of her confirmation, comes dangerously close to judging her based on her heritage. And any judge, liberal or conservative, will tell you the importance of trying not to do that.
[AP, NY Times, Washington Post, WSJ, CNN, State Department, US Senate]
Jeff Dubbinis a TheSequitur.com senior editor.
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