The Case Against Sotomayor (user search)
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  The Case Against Sotomayor (search mode)
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Author Topic: The Case Against Sotomayor  (Read 6333 times)
Brittain33
brittain33
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« on: May 04, 2009, 11:55:40 AM »

The court is not, nor was ever meant to be a representative body.

It is good for our democracy and society for it to be representative, and a diversity of experiences represented among nine great legal minds will produce fairer results with more perspectives.

Certainly having some diversity on the court in the 19th century would have helped us avoid some of the Court's more disgraceful opinions, as impossible as it was at the time.
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Brittain33
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« Reply #1 on: May 05, 2009, 10:10:32 AM »

Firstly, we're not a democracy and secondly the point of the court is to interpret the Constitution and determine whether laws that are challenged are constitutional in nature. The point of the court is NOT to give social justice to so called "repressed" groups of individuals.

Members of a privileged majority can err in interpreting the Constitution to favor them and disregard the impact of laws on the constitutional freedoms of minorities, as with Dred Scott (a case many pro-life people criticize, despite it coming from an all-male, all-white court) and Plessy.

Wouldn't you agree that having minority representation on the Supreme Court in the 1850s, while historically anachronistic and impossible, would have helped avoid the Dred Scott case, which many of your allies consider a forerunner of Roe v. Wade?
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Brittain33
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« Reply #2 on: May 08, 2009, 10:09:19 AM »


That is surely the end of her run. If all it takes is a quick YouTube check the media and Republicans will be all over this.

I wonder.

Everyone knows that what she said is true. It's essentially a propaganda point to say that judges don't make policy, and the only people who believe it are either ill-informed or highly invested in the propaganda. That's a sizable number of people. The latter group includes everyone who heard Clarence Thomas say he has "no opinion" on Roe v. Wade and smiled at this response, pretending to believe it while supporting him because they knew it wasn't true.

The salience of this argument depends on the salience of Republicans to turn it into a killer attack point, and I question its effectiveness. Republicans will find a common point of attack on any nominee Obama comes up with and run it through the "activist judges" filter. It's good this came out sooner, because Sotomayor can be prepared for when she's asked about it.

But while this doesn't disqualify her, there is the issue of whether Obama tries to avoid controversy. I think that question is more open on this specific attack than people would think, or it would be if the Senate were closer. We shall see. He has been very risk-averse until now.
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Brittain33
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« Reply #3 on: May 08, 2009, 03:36:09 PM »

What everyone knows and what is right are obviously two different things.

Judges make policy. It's not something "bad" judges do, it is an unavoidable part of the job. The Constitution does not provide literal instructions for every possible case that can come before a court. How a judge interprets the law is how he or she creates policy. You may consider one approach a better approach, but it is simply a different form of the same act.
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