A battle Supreme

Cornyn: Gingrich, Limbaugh “Terrible”

With John Huntsman having defected to China, will Texas Senator John Cornyn become the new hero for reasonable Republicans? The chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, not a known moderate himself, has attacked Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh for calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist.” “I think it’s terrible,” he told NPR. “This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.” He has also authored: a post for RedState, where he writes “Some believe that we should be a monolithic Party; I disagree. While we all might wish for a Party comprised only of people who agree with us 100 percent of the time, this is a pipedream.”Read it at CNN

Previewing the Sotomayor Battle
Rush Limbaugh may be in a tizzy over Sotomayor’s race and gender, but what do the senators who control her confirmation care about? NPR had Judiciary Committee members from both sides of the aisle weigh in. Senator John Coryn (R-TX) fretted over judicial activism, questioned remarks made in 2005 from Sotomayor about the court of appeals, calling them “troubling.” The court of appeals, Sotomayor said, is where policy is made. "We don't make law, I know,” she said. “I'm not promoting it, I'm not advocating it." She went on to say that in the court of appeals, the law is subject to interpretation. Coryn, a former Texas Supreme Court judge, said that the purpose of the appeals court is for “error correction.” Conversely, Sen. Charles Shumer, a Democrat from New York, says that Sotomayor’s comments were taken out of context: “What happens here is what the right wing often does: They will take half of the tape, show it, put it on YouTube and create an uproar.” Republicans opposed to Sotomayor, Schumer said, have “nothing to hang their hats on.”Read it at NPR