Sen. Kyl was great in his questioning of Sotomayor

He didn’t let her get away from the fact that she had clearly and repeatedly said in her speeches that a judge’s ethnicity and sex should make a difference in how a judge judges.

Her denials that she has said what she had clearly and repeatedly said were blatantly dishonest. This woman is a LIAR. We’ve learned at least that much from these hearings.

At the same time, when it comes to Soto’s personality and manner, I have to say that I find her likable, far more likable than the evil Communist gnome Ruth Bader Ginsberg or the good little girl Sandra Day O’Connor; I could imagine sitting in a restaurant having a friendly chat with Soto—inconceivable in the case of Ginsburg or O’Connor. That doesn’t change the fact that she is a Hispanic racialist diversity queen and a bald faced LIAR who has no business being on the U.S. Supreme Court.

As for Jon Kyl, most Republican senators and congressmen are one quarter intelligent. They will ask a good question, then accept an evasive answer and go on to the next point. In contrast to that usual, depressing rule, Kyl refused to accept Soto’s evasive and dishonest answers and kept pointing out the contradictions in her statements.

As a friend remarks, the GOP senators really don’t like Soto’s ethnic consciousness routine, and they are taking a strong stand against it.

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Also, have you noticed how many of the senators pronounce her name. Instead of saying, “SOtomayer,” with the accent on the first syllable, and unstressed last syllable, which sounds like American English), they say a big show of saying “SotomayOR,” as though they were speaking Spanish.

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A. Zarkov writes:

Senator Kyl’s questioning has been better than that of the other Republicans, but that’s not saying much. Sotomayor has made a number of errors in her responses to questions and unless I missed it, none of the Republicans picked up on it. Here are just two of many.

1. The Kelo case is a big deal because it provides a vast expansion in the power of government to take private property. Kelo is also one of the most criticized Supreme Court decisions in recent years. Yet Sotomayor does not seem to understand the basic facts of the case. In her response to Senator Kohl’s question on Kelo she said, “And there, the court held that a taking to develop an economically blighted area was appropriate.” But that’s not right because both sides agreed the area was not blighted. Indeed the Supreme Court had held as far back as 1954 that a city could transfer property from one private owner to another in Berman v. Parker. Kelo broke new ground by allowing this in a non-blighted area. Sotomayor should have known all about Kelo because she herself relied on Kelo in her decision in Didden v. Village of Port Chester. Thanks go to Ilya Somin for pointing this out in his blog posting. Somin will give testimony in the Senate hearings on the Sotomayor nomination, but not on this.

2. Sotomayor blew again on Kelo when she said that the Supreme Court held the the city could “contract with a private developer to effect the public purpose.” No. I picked up on this one myself instantly as she spoke, and I have not even studied the Kelo decision in any detail. The Supreme Court held that the state can actually transfer ownership from one private party to another private party and that’s permissible under the U.S. Constitution because it promotes economic development. One can understand why the public is so enraged about Kelo. This would allow the state to take the building for a Ford dealership and transfer it a Honda dealership all in the interests of economic development even though the Ford dealership was an ongoing successful business. Yet listening to Sotomayor one would think Kelo just allows the state to take property and hire a contractor to develop it. What kind of a justice is she going to make when she gets the basic parts of a major case wrong? Moreover how come a room full of lawyers questioning her failed to see she got it wrong? Again Somin found this error too and writes about it here.

Now I realize that this looks like a lot of “green eyeshade stuff,” but that’s what law is all about. We should want only the highest caliber minds on the Supreme Court. Minds that are so sharp they would never make such errors even under the stress of testifying. After all being on this court is the pinnacle of success for a lawyer, and having parents from Puerto Rico should be irrelevant. But no this is what we get as our Republic sinks ever deeper into the swamp of ignorance under the weight of multiculturalism.

LA replies:

Ok, “great” was overstating it, but I was so excited to see a Republican say to a liberal, “You are contradicting yourself,” as Kyl said to Sotomayor, that I indulged in some grade inflation.

Kevin V. writes:

I read your post today about how you could see yourself talking with Sotomayor and enjoying her company, something you could not imagine with the “evil Communist gnome” Ginsberg. That brought to mind something that I learned years ago that shocked me. I was attending a Federalist Society event as a law student and was delighted to see Justice Scalia in attendance. I don’t remember exactly how the issue was brought up, but the justice was asked about how the justices get along, considering the sharpness of the divide and their respective views on the Constitution. To my surprise, and that of the audience, Scalia said that the justices got along well and that the justice he was probably closest to as a friend, who he frequently socialized with, was Justice Ginsberg.

I still have a hard time seeing that friendship in action!

LA replies:

I’ve always been repelled by the notion of his friendship with her.

Kevin replies:

It certainly is odd, though I’m willing to forgive Scalia much given how great his impact has been on shaping our law. Even in very liberal law schools, his dissents are studied and discussed intensely. I’ve personally seen the force of his old dissenting opinions give young liberals pause—many times for the first time in their lives.

I think he will go down in history as one of the great Justices, though perhaps not until long after his death.

Ginsberg will be forgotten a few weeks after retirement.

That fact will have to console us for now.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2009 01:30 AM | Send