More Thoughts On Sonya Sotomayor

I have made the following comments on various blogs, but not my own. So I thought I would go ahead and do so.

Sotomayor's comments about her "rich latina heritage" are overblown. Now, I don't believe that a person is more capable of making wise decisions by virtue of their upbringing in a particular ethnicity. But that is not really the point. I really don't believe that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc think that judges are without bias in their decision making. If they do, they're idiots. But I don't think they're idiots.

What I think the problem is, is that Sotomayor admitted out-loud to having bias, or the potential for bias in her decisions. In other words, she said what everyone knows to be true, but has refrained from saying before...at least as directly as she did. Justices O'Connor, Alito and Scalia have all said that their backgrounds, religions and upbrining would play some role in their decision making processes.

Furthermore, Sotomayor appears to be completely competent. There has been much said about her so-called "60% reversal rate." But such a label is disingenuous at best. First, the 60% figure comes from the fact that 3 of 5 opinions she authored were reversed on appeal. However, for an opinion to be a majority opinion, there must be at least another judge concurring. That means that another judge agreed with her assessment. Secondly, Sotomayor was a concurring judge in many other opinions that were NOT reversed. So her record is actually much better than pundits have been letting on.

Does this mean that I would vote for her, not necessarily. But it does mean that I wouldn't spend countless hours trashing the woman with no real basis to do so. It means that I wouldn't go spouting criticisms because of a single quote, rather than the dozens and dozens of opinions she has authored or joined in the last 20 years.