Among Sotomayor's questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of '94. They -- along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists -- set the Republicans' tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had "a temperament problem" and advised that "maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection." That's the crux of the '94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn't for Graham.Read the column. It's pretty damn good.
« Obama, Cosbyism and Black Nationalism | Main | Open Thread At Noon » Frank Rich Gets It20 Jul 2009 11:00 am
Heh, on the Ancien Regime:
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I cringed multiple times when Lindsey Graham was speaking. First, he he was rambling...a lot. His whole long statement about courage and civil rights legislation, was very weird. He wouldn't have had the courage to stand up against Jim Crow in the 1950s, good to know. Worse yet though, many times, he sounded like he was being incredibly patronizing to a woman that is about ten times more prestigious, intelligent and experienced than he is. I actually thought it was borderline offensive, like he was both lecturing her and scolding her but also patting her on the head. Ugh.
I don't think there's any 'borderline' about it, honestly.
You're right, the only reason I said borderline because the whole thing was so confusing it was hard to understand what he was getting at half the time. Even HE didn't seem to know what he was talking about.
Fair enough. I just think we're so used to 'giving people the benefit of the doubt' in our language, and...maybe people don't always deserve it.
What was he "getting at"?
The most honest thing he said was that she would be confirmed, barring a meltdown. The rest was going thru a list of cultural markers to reassure his supporters so that in a future primary race, he could say that he asked her the "tough questions", even if he voted to confirm her nomination. This was all Kabuki (or shameless pandering, if you prefer) performed for the benefit of South Carolina voters who might be tempted to vote for someone more conservative in a primary race.
It's a good column; the Huckabee/West Side Story/Maria Sotomayor thing was pretty priceless. However, I think Rich is wrong on Graham's point about Sotomayor's style during oral arguments: that was a prefectly valid line of questioning. The whole thing about self-reflection was Graham's admission that Sotomayor was going to be confirmed, and that she should less tempermental with appellate advocates as a SCOTUS justice than she was a 2nd Circuit judge. "As long as Mark and Jenny stay together," on the other hand... now THAT's rich.
I don't think Graham, or any other Senator, has told any male in confirmation hearings that he needed to take some time to reflect on his temperament. I'm sure race comes into it, but that's the line that stood out to me as something that men just never have to deal with.
Not Sotomayor, but Gorilla Glue has come out against Zell Miller's suggestion to Gorilla Glue Obama to his chair.
I'm going to have to disagree with this whole male/female issue regarding juidicial temperament. Ginsberg didn't have to deal with it in '93 beacuse it was never an issue with her: she's always had a reptaution as being very measured and respectful on the bench. Likewise, Breyer, Alito and Roberts had pretty decent reputations with regard to judicial temperament.
I can guarantee you that if Bush had selected Michael Luttig, the Democrats would have questioned him on that, beacuse he had a reputation as being very hostile with appellate advocates, in contrast to Roberts or Alito, although Roberts has emerged as a somewhat tough questioner as Chief Justice.
Would these same Senators admit that Scalia has a "temperament" issue and should be more respectful and measured on the bench? Considering that Scalia seems to the absolute hero justice for these guys, it seems a little hypocritical.
In general it seems SCOTUS justices are pretty sharp with their questions.
And IMO, we want them to be sharp with their questions. (While still respectful.) This is the Supreme Court, not kindergarten.
I think they simply read and believed the exaggerations that showed up in the New Republic piece that ran just before she was nominated. The anonymous commenters were so obviously trying to spike her in favor of some other candidate that it was difficult to take it seriously, but someone like Sessions or Graham would be looking for something like that.
I don't know what the definitive interpretation "should" or "could" be about the questioning of Sotomayor's temperament (and I'm not the interested in pinning it down either) but I will say this - there is a very common stereotype of Latinos and Latinas being "hot-tempered" and "fiery" and therefore, prone to emotional outbursts and cloudy thinking.
This stereotype is real. I think it's awfully coincidental that a Latina would be so pointedly questioned in such a manner about her temperament, when we live in a culture, where such stereotypical notions of the Latina emotional temperament exist.
I listened to most of Session's and Graham's questioning of Judge Sotomayor. It made me nauseous.
One thing that I will say is that this is usually how it goes with these sorts of hearings. Not the racial stuff, but the fact that the Senators asking questions of Supreme Court nominees have a tendency to sort of come across as clowns. Supreme Court nominees, other than Harriet Miers, are by necessity the most qualified and experienced people in the country, people who could run oratorical circles around anyone, and they're being questioned by people who don't have to do a lot more than show some working knowledge of hog anatomy when they make campaign visits to their local State Fair.
I agree that the senators seemed largely clueless here but this seems to be part of a more general phenomena with them. I suppose that this might reflect the possibility that they are talking down to their constituents but they are pretty convincingly ignorant. Does anyone have some sense of how dependent senators are on their staffs for most of the decisions that they make?
It depends on the Senator. I worked for Sen. Slade Gorton (R.Wa.) 25 yrs ago and he was, and is, intellectually a heavy weight, but some of his colleagues? Not so much (I don't just mean Dan Quayle.)
Yeah, I haven't watched the Sotomayor hearings, but I definitely got the same impression during the Roberts confirmation that people are describing here- even if he wasn't the smartest person in the room (which he may well have been), he was clearly way over the heads of the senators who were trying to "trip him up" with truly idiotic questions. Sometimes you're the windshield...
If 108 of the 110 SCOTUS' have been White males, with women and people of color shut out of the process for most the last 200 years, I would submit that these nominees could not possibly be "the most qualified and experienced people in the country." If broad swaths of "qualified and experienced" Americans were/are shut out of the process, how do we know we have the best of the best?
ap, the "most qualified and experienced" do not have to be the "best of the best", in terms of potential, they just have to have been given access and a chance/profile to climb the ladder. my sense of CT's post is that he was pointing to a discrepancy between the interviewers and the interviewees, so to speak, which is why i was wondering why the senators seemed so ill equipped for this fight/debate. if it was just politial theatre for their re-elections than perhaps this sham of a practice should be brought to an end b/c it demeans the court if not the senate.
Watching and listen to the Senate hearings was just plain bizarre.
Last week was a circus freak show.
Are these senators the best we can do within the system?
The GOP premise seems to be that there is only one proper and moral way to interpret the Constitution -- as if any who disagrees with, say, Robert Bork is somehow corrupt and unpatriotic.
Rich was spot on this week by arguing that most of us just yawned at these Senators usual narrow minded song and dance act and moved on.
What I think has gotten lost in the debate over gender/race that has come around again with Sotomayor's nomination is how much their ignorant questioning put off everybody, including some of the folks they're trying to appeal to. I have to believe that the white males I work with aren't the only ones who were on her side because they have at some point in their lives been questioned by and supervised by a Lindsey Graham or Jeff Sessions. It's tough to keep a straight face when the person asking you questions isn't even 1/2 as smart or qualified as you are but you've got to get through them to get the job. It's hard to keep words like "douchebag" from your lips when the person questioning your qualifications got his job because his daddy knows the CEO.
I have to believe that the white males I work with aren't the only ones who were on her side because they have at some point in their lives been questioned by and supervised by a Lindsey Graham or Jeff Sessions.
That's a really good point. And I think most of us aren't feeling resentment because Sotomayor got into a prestigious law college and we didn't-- most of us never got to that level in the first place.
This confirmation hearing reinforced one of my strongest beliefs:" most people elected are idiots and that they resent smarter people than them". Watching those republicans clowns made me doubt about the viability of the 2 party system in America.
I have often found myself wondering why they would try the reverse discrimination line with someone who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. Nobody thinks that's handed out. And it gives you a one-liner refutation. But they plow ahead anyway. Maybe it's because they are used to "creating reality" rather than studying it?
Pat Buchanan believes Judge Sotomayer's Catholic HS valedictorian honor, her Princeton admission, grades and undergraduate honors, (including summa), her Phi Beta Kappa membership, her Yale Law admission and her position on the Yale Law Review were all the result of affirmative action and "grading on the curve." (Of course a little "self reflection" by Pat would reveal that if he believes this bilge, he's too stupid to live.) And if you read the comments sections on various political blogs, so do a lot of others. Sad, potentially dangerous, but true.
I loved how she stayed silent when Graham needled her with the "Okay, say it to me," line. I think with that moment of self-control alone she revealed her worth.
It's really crazy to watch the GOP spin out of control like this. I can't imagine what it must be like to come out of an administration like the Bush presidency, and watch impotently as every little thing slips out of their hands. They did their best with Sotomayor but they were never going to win that one. I suppose part and parcel of being part of the Ancien Regime means not being able to choose your battles wisely these days.
Well, from all the 'splainin' going on, one might suppose that all women ought to be the ditzy redhead stereotype that Lucille Ball hyperbolized to great and comic effect. Someone laughabale, no doubt. What we want out of our Latinas is that they do not consider themselves any wiser than white men, nor any less bland than what their public personas belie about their own very ill bigoted and manipulative true selves.
Pardon me, nor anly less bland than what their Senatorial questionners public personae belie.
this exchange got sent to me last week and underscores that 'dumb' southern male GOPers' don't have a monopoly on WTF moments in Congress. I think the clip shows the full context of the exchange, but if somebody knows more, please update. sorry to bring up a closed post TNC, but your 17jul statistical posit and the ensuing commentary resonated with me as I watched another Senator recklessly insert pigment into politics. I suffer more from progressive naivete/idealsim than white guilt, but the endgame is usually the same: nauseating embarrassment. that tribalism and bigotry are traits shared by all humans, regardless of skin color, is a bittersweet solace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE_jGD5nZ6U
If Mr. Allford was head of the US Chamber of Commerce and happened to be a Black man, you might have a point. But Allford is head of the National BLACK Chamber of Commerce, so race was introduced by his presence at the hearing, not because of his pigment but because of the nature of the org. he represents. I would guess that his org/association's mission has something to do with the national advancement of at least some colored people. Sen. Boxer's insertion of the documents into the hearing record, seems perfectly appropriate to me. It is Allford's reaction that appears to be more than a bit staged.
Oh good lord, i gotta be careful reading this stuff at work... i laughed out loud at that line, one of many. The article overall is really good. Ancien regime, indeed.
Yeah, but that was truly the funniest line, especially the "but never mind". Coburn is a walking, talking "but never mind". =)