Setting the record straight on Sotomayor

By BRIAN DICKERSON

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This morning I will take your questions regarding Sonia Sotomayor.

Is she still together with David Lee Roth?

I think you may be confused. Judge Sotomayor is President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So she and Roth are over?

I’m not sure she’s even heard of Van Halen. Right now, she’s getting ready for her confirmation hearings.

What can we expect to learn from those hearings?

If all goes well, they should give us a pretty good idea which Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee plan to run for president in 2012.

Won’t they also give us some indication of how Judge Sotomayor plans to rule on some of the major controversies pending before the court?

Not if she’s any good.

What’s the point of asking Sotomayor a lot of questions if she has no intention of answering them?

It takes a lot of money to run for president. Senators who plan to run in four years need to start getting national exposure now.

I’ve heard that Sotomayor was a beneficiary of affirmative action. What does that mean?

It means that 34 years ago, when she was one of the first Hispanic women admitted to Princeton, she had to endure the condescension of a lot of snot-nosed prep school kids who weren’t fit to copy her lecture notes.

But what difference does it make today? What does a person whose minority status may have helped her gain access to some early educational opportunities have to do to establish that she has succeeded on her own merits?

Getting elected president of the United States seems to help.

How about graduating at the top of your class in college and law school, acquiring decades of judicial experience and being nominated to the highest court in the land?

Not so much.

Reading the bully

I’ve read that Judge Sotomayor can be a bully on the bench. What exactly does that mean?

It means that 1) she is sometimes impatient with attorneys who appear in her courtroom unprepared, and 2) she is a woman.

What does gender have to do with it? What do you call a male judge who gets impatient with attorneys who are unprepared?

You call him Mr. Chief Justice Roberts, unless you are speaking informally.

Judge Sotomayor, who was raised Catholic, once ruled in favor of a group of anti-abortion protestors who claimed that police used excessive force against them at a demonstration. Doesn’t that suggest she’s sympathetic to the pro-life movement?

Possibly. But it might only suggest she’s sympathetic to people who get beat up by the police.

I thought she was a tough prosecutor.

Have you ever seen any prosecutor described otherwise? Google “prosecutor,” and then “tough prosecutor.” You’ll get 5 billion hits either way.

Fred Barnes, who writes for the Weekly Standard, said on Fox News that Sotomayor was “not the smartest.” What’s he trying to suggest?

I’m not sure, but it must be a backhanded slap at Justice Samuel Alito, whose collegiate record at Sotomayor’s alma mater was decidedly inferior to hers.

OK, so maybe she’s not that stupid. But don’t you worry that she’ll filter every argument anyone makes in the Supreme Court through her experience as a Latina woman who came of age in the Vietnam era?

A little. But wouldn’t it be a whole lot scarier if she started channeling Oliver Wendell Holmes?

X Brian Dickerson is deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.