racist

That seems to be the consensus of just about every legal and political expert who watched the first day of the Supreme Court nominee ably fending off attacks and responding to both soft and hardball questions. As we already knew, Supreme Court nominees are careful not to say anything — both because it can and [...]

The endlessly repeated remark that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor made in speeches and law review articles that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” is an odd one, if [...]

Under intense grilling from Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) this afternoon, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was forced to confront directly her words in various speeches to minority law students over the past two decades in which she said that gender and ethnicity can affect how a judge views a case, and may in some situations affect the [...]

John Avlon at The Daily Beast has been all over the Young Republicans’ election of new Chairwoman Audra Shay, an Iraq War veteran whose Facebook feed was cited for racist comments by friends and seeming messages of agreement from Shay. According to Avlon, some YRs are angry enough to talk about quitting:
Calls for party unity [...]

The Congressional Research Service has issued a report analyzing the opinions of Judge Sonia Sotomayor and concluded, just as previous studies of her opinions have, that she is anything but a judicial activist.
Notwithstanding her much-decried “wise Latina woman” claim, it turns out Sotomayor is no liberal activist hell-bent on replacing the Constitution’s equal protection clause [...]

Not according to J. Gerald Hebert, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked with Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and testified at his 1986 confirmation hearing.
Back in 1986, Sessions was a U.S. Attorney who’d been nominated to be a federal judge by President Ronald Reagan. He was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee — the second [...]

Bay Buchanan, whom I interviewed this week about troubled anti-immigration activist Marcus Epstein, has published a fuller account of his problems and a broadside against the — wait for it — “lynching” that ensued.
The stories about Marcus were for the most part inaccurate and incomplete.  Yet, the left wing bloggers ran with this little factoid [...]

Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich admitted on Fox News’ “Hannity” that maybe Sotomayor herself isn’t a racist. Still, he insisted, her statements are.
“In my newsletter I went a step too far in saying that she is a racist because I don’t know her and there’s no evidence [of racism] in her court decisions,” Gingrich [...]

The 172-pages of answers (not including the appendix) provided by Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday reveal, as one would expect, a long resume replete with the academic credentials and professional honors we’ve already heard about, plus lots of details of key opinions and the varied list of publications and speeches [...]

Not content with the right-wing pundits’ method of evaluating Judge Sonia Sotomayor by hurling epithets and baseless accusations against her, Tom Goldstein, the eminent Supreme Court litigator and editor of SCOTUSblog, has actually done the hard work of reading Sotomayor’s opinions in cases involving race.  Here’s what he found:
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and [...]