Koh told the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that the administration is guided by the principles of proportionality — no overreaction to an al-Qaeda attack — and distinction, meaning no civilians can be targeted. There’s more:

Koh also responded to critics who have questioned the legality of such attacks under international law. “[S]ome have suggested that the very use of targeting a particular leader of an enemy force in an armed conflict must violate the laws of war. But individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerent and, therefore, lawful targets under international law….[S]ome have challenged the very use of advanced weapons systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, for lethal operations. But the rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system involved, and there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.”

I have to go back here to my colleague Dave Weigel’s coverage of the conservative effort last year to keep Koh out of his job because he was allegedly a wild-eyed enemy of American sovereignty. Koh’s chief persecutor was Ed Whelan of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, who capped tendentious readings of Koh’s writings by contextualizing them in hysterical ways like this:

“What judicial transnationalism is really all about,” wrote Whelan, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”

Perhaps Whelan would like to explain how launching missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles onto targets in Pakistan and Yemen — which kill, by the New America Foundation’s estimate, one civilian for every two combatants — are the favored policy response of effete European elites. The ACLU, meanwhile, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the formal legal arguments prepared by the Obama team justifying the drone strikes.

Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges provides that a judge “should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Sotomayor’s public cheerleading for Obama seems clearly to violate that ethical obligation.

This is sort of nonsensical — the conservatives on the court, such as Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, are common presences around D.C. conservative events. And the odds of Sotomayor adjudicating a case that pits Obama against Sen. John McCain are pretty slim.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

Though the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals declined to re-hear the case, suggesting a majority of judges agreed with Sotomayor, columnists from Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and Stuart Taylor at National Journal to Ed Whelan at National Review have attacked Sotomayor for allowing the city of New Haven to consider the racial impact of determining promotions based purely on an exam that had a racially disparate impact.

If we lived in a society where the law forbids ever taking race into account, then the critics might be right. But we don’t live in a race-blind society and our laws — such as the Civil Rights Act, under which New Haven could have been sued for discrimination if it had promoted only white firefighters — acknowledge that.

Take, for example, the No Child Left Behind Act, one of the signature acts of the Bush administration, signed into law in 2002 with the overwhelming support of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. That law, recognizing that minority children in this country have historically not done as well in school as white kids, explicitly requires school districts to categorize student success by, among other things, race. And the outcomes make a big difference for the district. If minority children are performing below a certain level, schools are penalized, and eventually can even be closed. So schools have an incentive to target extra resources toward minority students that aren’t performing well to ensure they meet the law’s targets.  Isn’t that a race-based standard?

Did any of the Republicans who sponsored the law – including John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the House and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) in the Senate complain about that?  Not that I can tell.

When President George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans included race-based criteria in their legislative agenda, it wasn’t illegal discrimination or affirmative action; it was compassionate conservatism. When a Latina woman is among a group of judges who acknowledge racial realities, she’s a hard-left liberal with a “very expansive” reading of the constitution that’s guided by “her personal feelings” rather than the law.

When President George H.W. Bush nominated Sotomayor to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Princeton and Yale graduate, former prosecutor and commercial litigator, sailed through Senate confirmation with ease. But when President Clinton nominated her to the Court of Appeals, Republicans stalled her nomination for more than a year — reportedly because they knew that a spot on the highly-regarded Second Circuit would situate her well for a future appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

TWI’s David Wiegel has written about how Republicans are itching to use President Obama’s first Supreme Court nomination to galvanize Republican loyalists — something The New York Times picked up on this past weekend.

These latest attacks on Sotomayor’s legal opinions are just that — politics, not principle.