I've had a rough week (my students sometimes read, so I'll have to be a bit less transparent than I have been in the past), so I'm just now getting around to the issue of judge Sonia Sotomayor as the new Supreme Court nominee.
On one level, she's an affirmative action hire, a two-fer as a Hispanic female; however, unlike the last AA nominee, Clarance Thomas, she has a far better record as a judge on both the federal district and appellate levels. That's not to say that Thomas was unqualified, but he only had a year or two on the DC circuit and was rushed a smidge to fill the "black seat" being vacated by Thurgood Marshall. Thus, you can't play the quota-hire card on Sotomayor, at least not with any honesty.
Sotomayor is left-of-center to be sure, a fair replacement for Souter on an ideological basis; not a total knee-jerk liberal, but enough of one to make conservatives justifiably uncomfortable. However, I haven't seen any red flags that would make moderates blanche enough to make a conservative filibuster hold up. The RINO Sisters of Maine will vote for her in all likelihood, and that gives 61 votes for cloture as long as all 59 Democratic and liberal independent senators are on hand; they can even let Ted Kennedy stay at home with his brain cancer recovery and still get 60. If Al Franken finally gets his MN seat approved, they can give an ailing Porkasaurus Rex a pass on showing up as well.
The final vote may go further into the 60s, as a few moderate or polite Republicans may vote for her to avoid looking nativist for voting down the first Hispanic SC justice.
A few points in the debate have bothered me to this point.
(1) Conservatives ragging on the virtue of empathy and/or compassion in a judge, harkening to the "justice is blind" meme. However, you don't always want a judge that will coldly apply the letter of the law without any mitigation. The same guys who are ragging on the empathy of Sotomayor or other liberal judges would rip a local judge for closing down a kid's lemonade stand on health code violations and/or the lack of a sales tax licence, or banning a backyard treehouse on building code violations.
Conservatives want empathy, but not empathy that goes against their favored classes (businesses, traditional religion, white guys).
(2) Sotomayor's faux pas for saying that appellate courts are where policy is made. As they say in Washington, a faux pas is an accidental telling of the truth; here's CNN's coverage of her 2005 Duke comments.
"All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people
with Court of Appeals experience. Because it is — Court of Appeals is
where policy is made," she said. "And I know, and I know, that this is
on tape, and I should never say that. Because we don't 'make law,' I
know. [Laughter from audience] Okay, I know. I know. I'm not promoting
it, and I'm not advocating it. I'm, you know. [More laughter] Having
said that, the Court of Appeals is where, before the Supreme Court
makes the final decision, the law is percolating. Its interpretation,
its application."
American law is based, in large part, of the British tradition of common law, where the rulings of judges in the past make up the lion-share of law; where laws have not been clearly written, it is up to judicial precedent to fill in those gaps. So, she is right in that the appeals courts are making law in a very literal way.
What is at issue is how to make such interpretations and how much weight to pay past decisions, of how much a judge should stare at stare decisis.
(3) Saying that she's a better judge because she's a Latina comes over as "racist" to the white guy pundits. She's partly right, since she'll have a broader perspective than the average Anglo jurist. Applying the law requires understanding the circumstances where it is being applied, and there will be some advantage of having a minority member of a court to bring that perspective to bear on the deliberations.
Yes, you can get that perspective by interviewing people of a given ethnic group or by having staffers of that ethnic group put in their $0.02. However, a broader group is likely to give a more robust decision rather than a homogeneous group that lacks perspective.
One flip-side to that is that we often have a liberal false-diversity, where we have all the ethnic and life-style groups covered, but they all come from a hard-left academic hothouse, where the blacks, Anglos, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, gays, deaf, disabled and quilting aficionados are all liberal. However, that doesn't seem to be the problem with the current Supreme Court, which is fairly representative of modern political thought.
This may be a bit tacky, but given that she is a Puertorriqueña from New York, she might (at least rhetorically) be the niece of one of the Sharks from West Side Story. She was born in 1954, which would have made her a tyke when the Romeo and Juliet story got recast in post-WWII Nuevo York with the Puerto Rican Sharks and Anglo Jets gangs played the roles of the Montagues and Capulets; or should that be reversed, since Maria is Juliet and Juliet was a Capulet.
Anyway, while we could do far better, if we have to pick a left-of-center judge (that's what you get when you pick a left-of-center president, like it or not), Maria's niece isn't all that bad of a choice.
Bruce, I can, as a FPOTUS would say, feel your pain. However, I don't recall Larson or the Chapel being anti-poor, unless things changed drastically after I left there.
They may well be guilty of being insufficiently pro-poor. They did lean upscale and I don't recall outreach to the poor being a big part of their ministry. They did a good job of reaching out to the University of Akron campus next-door (literally; they use UA parking lots on Sunday), but were rather lily-white and didn't stress things like food pantries or clothing give-aways to the poor.
Also, as an evangelical church, they may not have participated in some of the poverty-fighting programs of an "inter-faith" bent. I recall Larson got into some trouble with that inter-faith crowd by pointing out the differences between Christianity and Islam when those on the religious left wanted to focus on the "we're all praying to the same God" meme that was front and center post 9/11.
However, I don't recall them being anti-poor from a Word-of-Faith-style if-you're-poor-you-don't-have-enough-faith perspective. They tended to be more small-b Baptist in their theology, having grown out of a Baptist church.
Bruce, if you could give more details, I'd be willing to a more serious critique, but it would seem to be more errors of omission than of commission.
For instance, the Vineyard church I got married in was getting a bit Yuppie, and some more missional folks in the church left to start a church that did a better job of ministering to "the least of these." The Vineyard folks weren't anti-poor, but just not enough pro-poor for quite a few people's tastes. I think The Chapel may suffer from some of the same issues.
Thinking a bit deeper, I think there may have been some errors of commission as well. Here's a passage from my 2003 post
Let's look at this roster for a moment. I was in a "Young Professionals" class, but I was a doctoral student at Kent State at the time. What if you were a Young Nurse's Aide or a Young Factory Worker or Young Restaurant Cook? Do you fit in a Young Professionals class where your cohorts are computer programmers and medical equipment manufacture field reps and doctoral students in finance?
Mr. Morrow's MySpace page has him down as 42 years old and with an income south of $30K; he's now working in Wisconsin for the state DNR. He's five years younger than I and would have been a potential classmate in the early 90s when I was in my early 30s and he was in his late 20s.