Slate Magazine's Dahlia Lithwick predicted Saturday what we
would see today at the Sotomayor hearings in the Senate Judiciary
Committee: "The judicial confirmation process is more or less the
political equivalent of Dancing With the Stars, in that the
senators perform complex leaps and turns while admiring their
hair in the mirror, while the nominee shuffles her feet a bit and
calls it the foxtrot."
If there were any surprises today, it was that Sotomayor
gave a few more inches of ground than expected in detailing her
judicial policy, and the senators were a hair less long-winded.
(Slate, for whatever reason, also constructed this stopwatch comparing
senator-to-nominee speaking time, for your independent
verification.)
Sen. Jeff Sessions set an aggressive pace for the hearing,
questioning Sotomayor's judicial impartiality and her assertion,
from a 2005 panel at Duke University, that judges make
policy. In response to the persistence of Sessions and
senators Orrin Hatch and Lindsey Graham, Sotomayor dropped a few
clues about her stance on the issue every Supreme Court nominee
tries to avoid: Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of
abortion.
Hatch established Sotomayor's belief that Roe was "settled
law" (somewhat true, but so were Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v.
New York, and dozens of others -- all overruled now.) Later,
Sotomayor told Sen. Feinstein that "the health and welfare of a
woman must be compelling consideration" in abortion-related
cases. These admissions are somewhat short of a policy brief, but
noteworthy during a hearing to which the original plaintiff Roe
paid a
protest visit.
Sotomayor early in the day attempted to recant for all time
that niggling quote from a 2001 speech about the exceptional
judiciary prowess of a wise Latina woman, explaining that she was
adding a "rhetorical flourish" on a quotation from a female
predecessor that, in reality, said roughly the opposite: "a wise
old man and a wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in
deciding cases."
Blogger William A. Jacobsen unearthed an
article from the NYU Law Review that settles the quote's
origin for all time (Sotomayor attributed the words first to
Sandra Day O'Connor, then to "Supreme Court Justice Coyle.") The
line belongs to Justice Jeanne Coyne of the Oklahoma Supreme
Court, and the article (by Justice O'Connor) goes on to say that
"asking whether women attorneys speak with a "different voice"
than men do is a question that is both dangerous and
unanswerable."
So I'd guess that Sotomayor hasn't seen the last of her
"wise Latina."
And Graham, the liveliest of the speakers yesterday,
created today's longest uncomfortable pause when, riffling
through his notes to find the precise language of Sotomayor's
"wise Latina" quote, asked her to recite it for him from memory.
Was his motive efficiency, or a mischievous streak? At any rate,
he found the quote before she found her voice, so we'll never
know what sort of skirmish might have ensued.
