Here's a good little piece from the Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web Today" (James Taranto) that almost exactly mirrors my thoughts on Sonia Sotomayer. If I were in the Senate, I'd have voted for her; with the present Administration Sotomayer is the best we can hope for. I know several people who knew her when she attended Cardinal Spellman HS in the Bronx.
The U.S. Senate has confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court by a vote of 68-31. No Democrats dissented; nine Republicans voted “yes.” (Ted Kennedy was ailing and absent.)
If this columnist were in the Senate, we would have voted to confirm. We doubt that we will like her jurisprudence, and we do like that of, to take two recent examples, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. But it’s unrealistic to expect a Roberts or an Alito from an Obama. There is nothing, it seems to us, that renders Sotomayor unfit for the high court; an alternative nominee would as likely be worse as better; and, with 60 senators of the president’s party, a vote against would be purely symbolic anyway.
Thus a “no” vote would accomplish nothing except to ratify the notion that senators ought to base their confirmation votes on “ideology”--the same notion that defeated Robert Bork and injected a degree of ugliness into every GOP nomination the high court of the past 20 years.
Perhaps it would be futile for Republicans to resist this notion, since Democrats’ rejection of it seems irrevocable. But there is something to be said for taking the moral high ground, especially when there is no practical benefit to giving it up. The next time a Republican is president, GOP senators will not even be able to argue credibly that Democrats ought to refrain from partisan or ideological confirmation vote.
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