Think Progress

Inhofe: Sotomayor Is a ‘Racist,’ But Strom Thurmond Is A ‘Great American’

Echoing statements by nativist former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” last night on the Senate floor.  Watch it:

Interestingly, while Inhofe is convinced that the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court is consumed by racial animus, he had very different things to say about a fellow Southern white conservative.  After former Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) claimed that America would have avoided “all these problems” if it had put a segregationist in the White House, Inhofe quickly came to Lott’s defense:

“In an effort to honor the life and service of Strom Thurmond, Senator Lott made some comments that he probably wishes he had phrased differently,” Inhofe said. “I do not believe Senator Lott meant to be malicious or racist with the comments he made. I believe he was merely honoring a great American on his 100th birthday, but I believe he is right to apologize for the words he used. Racism of any type must not be tolerated.

“Many have been quick to criticize Lott, but few have been quick to accept his apology. I do not believe he harbors racist sentiments in his heart. He has apologized and appropriately clarified the meaning of his statements. I believe we should accept his apology and move forward.”

In Jim Inhofe’s America, Sonia Sotomayor is a dangerous bigot who must be stopped, but Strom Thurmond is a “great American.”

McCain Opposes Activist Judges, Unless They’re Conservative

One day after he warned that Republicans have a “very, very deep hole that we’ve got to come out of” with Latino voters, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced that he would oppose the first Latina nominated to the nation’s highest court. Moreover, in his statement opposing Judge Sonia Sotomayor, McCain misrepresents his own record on judges:

Again and again, Judge Sotomayor seeks to amend the law to fit the circumstances of the case, thereby substituting herself in the role of a legislator. … To protect the equal, but separate roles of all three branches of government, I cannot support activist judges that seek to legislate from the bench. I have not supported such nominees in the past, and I cannot support such a nominee to the highest court in the land.

Despite his claim that he has never supported a judge who “seeks to amend the law to fit the circumstances of the case,” McCain voted in favor of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; and he described both Roberts and Alito as “model judges” during the 2008 campaign.  A few of these three justices’ greatest hits include:

• Repealing the Twentieth Century: In three opinions that read like a tea-bagger’s wet dream, Justice Thomas would have restricted Congress’ power to enact economic regulation to a point unheard of since the Great Depression.  A short list of laws that would simply cease to exist in Clarence Thomas’s America includes “the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws.”
• Selling Justice To The Highest Bidder: Roberts, Thomas and Alito all joined dissents arguing that a West Virginia coal magnate could literally buy a judge for $3 million to overturn a verdict against his company.
• Corporate Immunity From the Law: Joined by Roberts, Alito wrote a dissent arguing that drug companies have almost-total immunity from the law when one of their dangerous products caused a former professional musician to lose her arm and her ability to play music.  Roberts, Thomas and Alito also joined a majority opinion giving sweeping immunity to the makers of dangerous medical devices.
• Massive Resistance: All three justices joined a radical opinion which not only held that it is unconstitutional for school boards to desegregate public schools, but which audaciously cited Brown v. Board of Education for this proposition.
• This Election Brought to You By Wal-Mart: Perhaps most ironic of all, all three of McCain’s justices are poised to declare McCain’s signature legislative accomplishment, campaign finance reform, unconstitutional.

As a Yale Law School study published before Roberts and Alito joined the Supreme Court determined, Justice Thomas is the one justice who is most likely to vote to invalidate an Act of Congress — doing so a massive 65.63% of the time. The Court’s two Clinton appointees, Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, are the least likely to second-guess Congress.  So McCain has no problem with judges who “substitute [them]self in the role of a legislator;” he’s just upset that Sotomayor won’t push the same right-wing agenda as his favorite justices.

Tancredo: Sotomayor Pals Around With Mexican Separatists

Doubling-down on his previous claim that Justice-to-be Sonia Sotomayor is a member of the “Latino KKK,” nativist former Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) published a column yesterday suggesting that she supports an imaginary movement of Mexican-Americans planning to wage civil war against the United States:

The last thing the Democrats want is for the American people to know about the National Council of La Raza, their radical agenda and Sotomayor’s association with the group.

Sotomayor is a member of La Raza and her comments about “Wise Latinas” being superior to white men appeared in the La Raza Law Journal. The National Council of La Raza bills itself as “the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States” who works through “its network of nearly 300 affiliated community-based organizations.”

Among these affiliates are several chapters of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) who La Raza helps fund. Aztlán is what radical “Mechistas”—as they refer to themselves on La Raza’s website—call the American Southwest, which they claim still belongs to Mexico. Their slogan is “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada” meaning “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.” One chapter says on La Raza’s site that their mission is “empowerment of our gente and the liberation of Aztlán.”

For starters, Tancredo offers no explanation for his belief that Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican, would somehow find common cause with Mexican-American separatists.  Mr. Tancredo may be unaware of this fact, but Puerto Rico is not part of Mexico.

Moreover, Tancredo’s claim that America is threatened by Mexican-Americans eager to start a second civil war is simply absurd hate speech.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Aztlán libel is based on a radical document published in 1969, which called on Mexican-Americans to “reclaim the land of their birth” and unite to fight “oppression, exploitation and racism.”  Although this document is nothing more than “a relic of the counterculture of the 1960s,”  nativist hate groups have seized upon it as a supposed “founding document of a bona fide conspiracy endorsed and backed by Mexico and, in some versions, by most Mexican Americans.”

For Tancredo, however, no theory is too bizarre, so long as it bolsters his deep-seated hatred of people who don’t look like him.

Afraid Of NRA, Conservative Democratic Senators Waffle On Sotomayor Vote

Noting Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record on the Second Amendment, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) told Roll Call that that he is “undecided” on her nomination to the Supreme Court (although he added that he is “leaning toward voting in favor”). Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) expressed similar uncertainty:

“I accept her judicial philosophy of fidelity to the law,” Nelson said during a telephone conference call from Washington.

Nelson said he also believes Sotomayor is committed to supporting settled judicial precedent.

But, he said, he needs to “convince myself she won’t be an activist” on the court.

“I need an opportunity to review a few things,” the Democratic senator said.

Both senators’ equivocal statements come in the wake of the NRA’s decision to “score” the Sotomayor vote in determining where each lawmaker stands on the NRA’s pro-gun agenda. The NRA claims, falsely, that because Sotomayor once upheld a New York law against a Second Amendment challenge this somehow proves that she is hostile to gun rights. That decision, however, did nothing more than apply well-established law.

Because lower-court judges are required by law to follow the commands of the Supreme Court, Sotomayor once joined an opinion which followed a Supreme Court case holding that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to the states. Nevertheless, the NRA launched a smear campaign against Sotomayor this month, claiming that she “deliberately misread Supreme Court precedent to support her incorrect view” in this case.

Frankly, the NRA is either lying, or it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Not only was Sotomayor correct to follow the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decision, but a unanimous opinion authored by Federalist Society darling Frank Easterbrook agreed with Sotomayor that state laws are not subject to Second Amendment scrutiny. Even the right-wing of the judiciary understands that judges are not free to ignore the law simply because the NRA doesn’t like it.

In the end, Begich and Nelson’s decision may be decided — not by Sotomayor’s actual record — but by how afraid they are of the NRA.

Will GOP Senators Defend Right-Wing Ad Calling Sotomayor The Leader Of A Terrorist Group?

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member of the Judiciary Committee, was a featured guest at a Georgetown fundraiser for the Committee for Justice in 2003. According to the New York Times, the event raised at least $50,000 for the right-wing group that is responsible for the recent Sotomayor slime piece. The attack ad makes the claim that Judge Sonia Sotomayor “led a group supporting violent Puerto Rican terrorists.” It attempts to link Sotomayor to “Obama’s buddy Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist who bombed American buildings in the seventies.” Watch it:

The right-wing group also has other ties to GOP Senators. CFJ’s Chairman of the Board worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign as a “Director of Conservative Outreach.” In 2003, a CFJ ad led Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to characterize CFJ as a “partisan hate group.” In response, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) defended CFJ and its ad on the Senate floor:

There has been an awful lot of railing about this ad by the Committee for Justice. It has a courthouse chambers with a little sign on it, and the sign says ‘Catholics need not apply.’ Isn’t this a legitimate commentary on how people feel about what is happening here? You can agree or disagree, and say it is not a really an accurate statement if you want to. I say it is legitimate commentary.

Are Sessions, Hatch, and their conservative colleagues still willing to defend the Committee for Justice and argue that it is “legitimate commentary” to imply Sotomayor is a terrorist?

TP’s Ian Millhiser is live-blogging today’s hearings. Check out his coverage here.

Grassley Admits That ‘Empathy Standard’ He Finds ‘Troubling’ In Sotomayor Didn’t Apply To Alito

During the opening day of confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor came under fire from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) for stating that her experiences as a Latina affects her judicial outlook. “This empathy standard is troubling to me,” Grassley said. “The Constitution requires that judges be free from personal politics … feelings and preferences.”

But Grassley never objected when Judge Samuel Alito said virtually the same thing during his confirmation hearing, when Alito testified he “can’t help but think of” his immigrant family when evaluating immigration cases:

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background, or because of religion or because of gender, and I do take that in to account.

Then yesterday, Grassley admitted to applying a double standard to Sotomayor during an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel. Siegel reminded Grassley that during Alito’s confirmation hearing, the judge said his background plays a role in his judicial philosophy — and Alito still managed to secure Grassley’s support:

NPR: By your standard that would be disqualifying. He should have said instead my family, my background counts for nothing.

GRASSLEY: That’s absolutely right. […]

NPR: But you didn’t vote against Justice Alito’s confirmation.

GRASSLEY: No I didn’t.

Listen here:

Also in Alito’s confirmation hearing, the judge referenced his father’s experience as the basis of his view on district reapportionment. The answer was in response to a questions asked by Grassley. Alito’s testimony and subsequent ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano prompted Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to ask in jest: “Did Alito’s Italian-American ethnic background cause him to cast his vote in favor of the Italian-American plaintiffs?”