The Whole Delivery

Leave it to Senators Russ Feingold and Sheldon Whitehouse to show us all the real story today of day one: Not showing how moderate Sonia Sotomayor is, but how radical John Roberts, our nation's Chief Justice, is. Feingold first: "Be weary of a phrase judicial activism." "That term seems to have lost all usefulness." "So many rules of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court could be consider activist in their disregard for precedent in their willingness to ignore or override any intent of Congress. Perhaps the best definition of judicial activist is a judge who decides a case in a way you don't like." Just real. And then Whitehouse "But that point comes when these words come as slogans, not real critiques of your record." "Code words seeing a particular judge." "The umpire analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts. Though he cast himself as an umpire. Some umpire." "Serving the interest and the value of the...

The push back against the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor have been well documented, with the video of Samuel Alito's similar comments surfacing and Gwen Iffl's well thought out statement yesterday on This Week. The Washington Monthly writer Daphne Eviatar probably gives the most striking point in defense of Obama's pick: Buried in Jeffrey Toobin’s recent profile of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is this astonishing fact: (bold emphasis added by me) In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. The recent uproar over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s comment eight years ago that being a Latina influences her perspective as a judge has led to charges by de facto R epublican spokesmen from Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck that she’s a “racist” for acknowledging th...