One vote for the Judge

Ron Jordan Natoli Studio/U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Judge Sonia Sotomayor ended a baseball strike in 1995.




On a Supreme Court Prospect’s Résumé: ‘Baseball Savior’

For some, that counts more than her Princeton degree.


Federal judges are rarely famous or widely celebrated. Yet during a brief period in 1995, Judge Sonia Sotomayor became revered, at least in those cities with major league baseball teams.

She ended a long baseball strike that year, briskly ruling against the owners in favor of the players.

Take me out to the ballgame.

The owners were trying to subvert the labor system, she said, and the strike had “placed the entire concept of collective bargaining on trial.”

Part of the reason [for her consideration as Justice Souter's replacement] is her approach on the bench, which she displayed as a trial judge in the baseball strike and for the last 11 years has shown as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. She questions lawyers vigorously, and delivers what her admirers say are crisp, forceful and reasoned decisions.

But her potential appeal to President Obama as a nominee to the Supreme Court also derives in part from her personal story, a version of the up-from-modest-circumstances tales that have long been used to build political support. Judge Sotomayor, 54, grew up in a Bronx housing project, a child of Puerto Rican immigrants. She would be the court’s first Hispanic justice.

I vote for her.

She went to Princeton, which she has described as a life-changing experience. When she arrived on campus from the Bronx, she said it was like “a visitor landing in an alien country.” She never raised her hand in her first year there. “I was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions,” Judge Sotomayor said.

Selected case of Judge Sotomayor.

In addition to ending the baseball strike while on the trial court, Judge Sotomayor ruled in another case that homeless people working for the Grand Central Partnership, a business consortium, had to be paid the minimum wage.

And why not? Exploitation is exploitation.

In 1997, Republican senators held up her nomination by President Bill Clinton to the appeals court for more than a year, because they believed that as a Hispanic appellate judge she would be a formidable candidate for the Supreme Court.

That's rich. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, they were simply the best candidates available, and simply happened to be white conservative men. Well, Thomas isn't white, but he sure is from the same mold as his three cohorts.

Some lawyers have described her courtroom manner as abrupt, but several others said in interviews that it represents nothing more than her direct, New York style. Judge Martin Glenn, who as a veteran appeals lawyer had appeared before her frequently, said that she was widely regarded as an excellent judge.

Abrupt? And the lawyers, is one to suppose, are kind and genteel?

In McCain's Court

Toobin is a talented reporter, a keen analyst, and a liberal; great combination. I saw part of his interview with Bill Moyers in the latter's Journal this evening, and was transfixed. Moyers, more than once, referred to Toobin's piece in the New Yorker. Here are some quotes from it.

Notice the scale is tipped to the right side, or, right wing.

The first sentence of the article jumps out at me: Successful politicians know how to attract attention, and how to avoid it" Both Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are such politicians, so when they speak they are speaking in considered and prepared words; they do not speak, all the more in hard-fought presidential campaigns, off-the-cuff. Every word said is meant to be said; at times, the words are not just words, but codes.

Senator McCain spoke mainly in generalities, rather than about such specific issues as abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty. But even if he hoped to sneak the speech past a distracted public, and have its coded references deciphered only by the activists who were its primary target, its message should not be lost on anyone. McCain plans to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, George W. Bush’s conservative counter-revolution at the Supreme Court.

This guy courts (pun intended) the image of being a maverick, but he isn't. Right wingers know that; he is making sure to remind them.

“Sometimes the expressed will of the voters is disregarded by federal judges, as in a 2005 case concerning an aggravated murder in the state of Missouri,” Toobin quotes McCain as saying, adding that McCain used code words such as "discourse on international law, the constitutions of other nations, the meaning of life, and ‘evolving standards of decency.’ These meditations were in the tradition of ‘penumbras,’ ‘emanations' ..."

Staunch, activist right-wingers know these words, and what they mean.

The giveaway here was that McCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage.

The case involved a teenager committing a heinous crime, and subsequently being sentenced to death.

Nor were his references to penumbras and emanations accidental. Justice Douglas used them in his 1962 Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy. In short, this one passage in McCain’s speech amounted to a dog whistle for the right—an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teen-agers.

Maverick? Not to me; right-wing nut. Nor to Toobin is McCain a maverick: When it comes to the Constitution, McCain is on the wrong side of the voters, and of history; thus, his obfuscations.

The stakes are so very high. That is why the Democrats must win.

For all the elisions in John McCain’s speech, one unmistakable truth emerged: that the stakes in the election, for the Supreme Court and all who live by its rulings, are very, very high. ♦