Elections Have Consequences

TW: Sotomayor is done with her hearings. Someone asked me what I thought about her. My answer is that I do not think much about her other than she was appointed by a Dem. At the end of the day elections have consequences one of the most profound of which is that the POTUS picks SCOTUS nominees who typically serve for decades. With very rare exceptions (i.e. Robert Bork who was known to be very controversial before his pick and was a bridge too far for the Republicans), the nominees get approved. Folks can shriek and moan but they are approved almost without fail.

There are occasionally nominees who veer off the ideological path assumed by the POTUS (i.e. Souter and Stevens not to mention the big Kahuna Earl Warren) but they are also relatively rare and a Dem has not had one of those in a long time. I suspect these outliers will become even less prevalent as, since Reagan, the Republicans make every effort to appoint rock-ribbed judicial conservatives. Alito and Roberts despite their silky smooth confirmations are turning out to be if anything more conservative than Scalia and Thomas. The current court is VERY conservative with the most "liberal" of the five member conservative majority, Anthony Kennedy, being more conservative than any of the 1950-1960 era justices.

The rest of this process is a charade. The Republicans last week had one goal, try to fire up whites about reverse discrimination whilst hopefully from their perspective not pissing off hispanics and others too much. They may have actually scored a few points.

Via Economist:
"DAHLIA LITHWICK writes...Sonia Sotomayor remains something of a mystery. The hearings, Ms Lithwick writes, have revealed nothing of Ms Sotomayor's "views on guns, gay marriage, abortion, military tribunals or eminent domain. We may actually know less about her views on these matters today than we did going into these hearings." Ms Lithwick wishes that there were "a better way of doing this—something that would bring out the best in all of us", but it's hard to understand why, much less what she means by "best": Ms Sotomayor proved herself an adept parrier and evader, even claiming to have never thought about whether the unborn have rights. The simple fact is that a president of either party has wide latitude to nominate a justice of his choosing. Republicans may dislike Ms Sotomayor, but that matters about as much as Democrats' dislike for John Roberts and Samuel Alito."