Think Progress

Thune To Conservative Activists: ‘We Need You’ To Help Obstruct Sotomayor

On a conference call organized by the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told a group of conservative activists that he needed their help to prevent Judge Sotomayor from being confirmed to the Supreme Court in a timely manner. “We need you involved in this process,” Thune told the call’s listeners, because Senate Democrats “are going to jam through this lifetime appointment rather than provide a full and fair review of her record.”

But Thune sang a different tune when President Bush was in office. Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) modeled Sotomayor’s 72-day confirmation schedule after the exact same 72-day schedule that was used to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts. Back then, Thune thought this schedule was more than adequate for him to make up his mind:

“Today marks the beginning of a historic and revered process. As we pay tribute to the legacy of former Chief Justice Rehnquist, we see many of the qualities that marked his tenure of excellence mirrored in Judge Roberts,” Thune said. “Judge Roberts brings with him a brilliant legal mind and a profound respect for the Constitution and the Court.

“I urge Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to put politics aside and allow a fair and efficient confirmation process to work. I look forward to hearing from Judge Roberts and have full confidence his experience and character will carry him swiftly through these important hearings.”

Perhaps Thune is simply having trouble understanding how Sotomayor’s confirmation schedule compares to Roberts’. To help explain this difficult concept to Sen. Thune, ThinkProgress has prepared this helpful chart:

Inhofe: I Made Up My Mind To Vote Against Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Nomination 11 Years Ago

In a surprisingly candid statement, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) admitted that his vote to oppose Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a “foregone conclusion” eleven years before she was even nominated:

“That was a foregone conclusion,” the Oklahoma Republican said, citing his 1998 opposition to Sotomayor’s nomination to her current post.

“If you voted against anyone on the circuit (court), I have never been able to see how you turn around when the bar is actually higher and support it at a higher level.” … [T]he senator was offered a meeting with the judge but turned it down since he already had made his decision to oppose her nomination and did not wish to take up her time.

Inhofe’s refusal to even consider Sotomayor’s record as a circuit judge is unfortunate, but it is hardly surprising.  During the Clinton Administration, Inhofe would frequently throw tantrums such as placing a hold on every single one of President Clinton’s judicial nominees in retaliation for Clinton’s decision to make a recess appointment, or bottling up every one of President Clinton’s civilian nominees in protest of Clinton’s decision to nominate a gay man to an ambassadorship.

This spring, Inhofe announced that he would filibuster President Obama’s nomination of Judge David Hamilton to a federal appeals court because Hamilton allegedly once forbade the Indiana legislature from opening its sessions with Christian prayer, but endorsed the use of Islamic prayer.  In reality, Hamilton held that any non-sectarian prayer would be acceptable, and that such a prayer could be offered in a foreign language such as Arabic.

Ultimately, however, Inhofe predicts his own opposition to Sotomayor will be futile:

“She will be definitely confirmed,” he said, adding that other Republicans will be too afraid to vote against Sotomayor because she is a woman and a Hispanic.

“I’m predicting half the Republicans at least will end up supporting her who might not otherwise because of these things I just mentioned.”

Kyl Threatens GOP Boycott of Sotomayor Hearing

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) told Roll Call yesterday that he and his Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee may boycott Judge Sotomayor’s hearings if Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) does not cave to right-wing demands to delay the hearings:

“As the hearing time approaches we will evaluate whether we can make that deadline,” Kyl said, explaining that if Republicans do not feel they can adequately question Sotomayor they will try to meet with Leahy to make a plea for more time.

However, Kyl, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, did not explicitly rule out the use of delay tactics, including a Republican boycott of the confirmation hearings, if an accommodation cannot be made.

But Kyl is not entitled to any more accommodations than what he has already received. Far from expediting Sotomayor’s confirmation process, Leahy set a schedule which is virtually identical to that enjoyed by Bush appointee John Roberts, even though Chief Justice Roberts’ record was more difficult to investigate because it was necessary to track down thousands of pages of documents Roberts produced while he worked in the Reagan and Bush I Administrations, and even though thousands of new documents relating to Roberts were uncovered just two weeks before his hearings began.

Kyl’s threat to take his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his way is unfortunate, but it is hardly surprising. Earlier this week, all seven GOP members of the Judiciary Committee signed a letter demanding that Sotomayor complete a series of irrelevant or even impossible tasks before her nomination may be considered.

McConnell Compares Sotomayor Confirmation To Closure Of Guantanamo Prison

Complaining about the Senate’s plans to consider the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor before the August recess, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News that obstructing Sotomayor’s confirmation is necessary to prevent a situation like Guantanamo Bay:

“We don’t want to have a situation like they did with Guantanamo where they didn’t even have a game plan,” McConnell, R-Ky., said, referring to the Obama’s administration’s lack of details on closing the detention facility, which compelled senators last month to strip $80 million of funding for the plan from a war spending bill.

“It’s an arbitrary date and it strikes me as a ticket to disaster,” he said.

It’s unclear how the timely confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice resembles the task of closing down an unconstitutional internment camp.

McConnell must not have been paying very close attention during the last eight years. The Guantanamo prison is a quagmire not because of President Obama’s lack of planning, but because of President Bush’s incompetent management of the facility. Because “most physical evidence” documenting why individual detainees were brought to Gitmo “either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty,” the Bush Administration made it nearly-impossible to perform the constitutionally required task of determining which detainees must be released.

The truth is this: Judge Sotomayor’s hearings will begin 48 days after her nomination was announced. Chief Justice Roberts, whose record was more difficult to investigate because it was necessary to track down thousands of pages of documents Roberts produced while he worked in the Reagan and Bush I Administrations, received a hearing after only 51 days. The Chief Justice was confirmed 72 days after his nomination, even though Senators were distracted from reviewing Roberts’ record after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The 72nd day after Sotomayor’s nomination will be August 6, the day before the August recess is supposed to begin. By confirming Sotomayor according to the Senate’s intended schedule, President Obama’s nominee will receive exactly the same treatment afforded to President Bush’s nominee.

In the end, Senator McConnell’s disingenuous attempts to obstruct Judge Sotomayor have nothing to do with allowing sufficient time to investigate her record. He’s just hoping to buy more time to drag Sotomayor through the mud.

Von Spakovsky: Still Fabricating Facts, Still Suppressing Votes

Further demonstrating that no conservative can be so disgraced that they cannot later be published in the Wall Street Journal, Bush-era vote suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky has an op-ed in today’s WSJ claiming that the Justice Department has “spent the last several months misinterpreting key voting rights laws for nakedly political reasons”:

Exhibit A: Justice’s inexplicable dismissal of a civil lawsuit for voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers weren’t content to endorse Barack Obama. They sent their members to the polls last November to “patrol election sites.” Fox News aired a video of two Black Panthers in military-style uniforms in a Philadelphia precinct. One of them was carrying a nightstick. . . .  But instead of following through and getting an injunction to prevent this behavior in future elections, the department, now under Mr. Holder, dismissed the lawsuit against all but one of the defendants (the nightstick holder).

Exhibit B: Justice recently stopped Georgia from implementing a key provision of the Help America Vote Act. Passed in 2002, the act requires states to verify the accuracy of information voters provide on their registration forms by comparing it with state driver’s license and Social Security records — a sensible requirement.

Both of Spakovsky’s exhibits have no basis in reality. Although his tale of Black Panthers patrolling polling sites sure sounds intimidating, the real facts are nothing like von Spakovsky claims.

Two African-American men did show up at a polling place dressed as stereotypical Black Panthers, but the Philadelphia District Attorney says that she took no action because there were “no complaints and no evidence” of any wrongdoing. Similarly, Zack Stalberg, Executive Director of the nonpartisan poll monitoring organization the Committee of Seventy, says that the two strangely-dressed men were “off-putting, not quite intimidating.” Indeed, the sole basis for any allegations of voter intimidation are statements by two poll watchers from an organization called “Democrats for McCain.”

In other words, the Justice Department dismissed their claim against the Black Panthers not for some nefarious purpose, but because there wasn’t any reliable evidence showing that the Black Panthers violated the law. Now that Spakovsky no longer works there, the DOJ actually requires evidence before it brings a case.

Spakovsky’s claim that the DOJ “stopped Georgia from implementing a key provision of the Help America Vote Act” is also false. In truth the DOJ halted an illegal voter suppression scheme that systematically screened out “thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote.”

Under the Georgia scheme, new voter registrations were compared to federal and state records to screen for non-matching names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and to screen for proof of citizenship. Thousands of eligible voters, however, were screened out because a state employee mistakenly entered the wrong information into a database. Once screened out, a voter had to jump through hoops before they could vote:

[E]lection officials can require these individuals also to appear at the county courthouse or office building, not at the voter’s convenience, but rather on a week day, during normal business hours and, pursuant to state law, with only three days notice.

Moreover, African-Americans were sixty percent more likely to be screened than white voters, and Asian and Latino-Americans were twice as likely to be falsely screened as non-citizens, a textbook violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The bottom line is this: during his disgraceful tenure at DOJ, Spakovsky routinely approved state voting practices that were later struck down by federal courts. He manipulated election law to benefit Republican candidates; he retaliated against career attorneys who stood in the way of his illegal efforts; and he even gave cash awards to career attorneys who towed the party line. Now that he is powerless, he is continuing his anti-voter crusade from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Wendy Long Takes A Swing At Sotomayor…And Misses

Wendy Long, Chief Counsel for the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network, sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee today accusing Judge Sotomayor of misrepresenting her record on the death penalty:

Dear Senators:

A first read through Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Senate questionnaire for her Supreme Court nomination raises more questions than it answers. It is already clear that she has omitted controversial material from her past in which she asserts that “[c]apital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society” and advocates public opposition to restoring the death penalty in New York state.

The “controversial material from her past” that Long refers to is an 1981 internal memorandum, co-signed by Sotomayor, which was prepared by a Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund task force for that organization’s board. That memo does indeed include the statement that “[c]apital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society.”

Although the internal memorandum is not specifically disclosed in Sotomayor’s questionnaire, Sotomayor did disclose, and provide senators with multiple copies of a 1981 letter she drafted on behalf of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. That letter states that “capital punishment represents ongoing racism in our society,” a virtually identical statement to the one Long accuses Sotomayor of hiding. Sotomayor’s 1981 letter can be viewed at the Senate Judicary Committee’s website.

Sotomayor kept no secrets from the Senate about how she felt about the death penalty in 1981, and Long shouldn’t waste the Senate’s time by grasping at straws.