Let’s go through Sonia Sotomayor’s purported qualifications for being on the Supreme Court:

• She grew up in a Bronx public housing project without a father: Well, that’s interesting, but hardly unique, and not much of a qualification in and of itself for anything, now, is it?  If the point is “she rose above all that” – again, good.  She set a great example.  Cue the applause.  But again, it’s hardly unique, even on the Supreme Court.
• She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton: Which shows that she played the paper chase from an early age.  A perfectly fine thing – but the only thing it really tells us about her, or anyone, is that she had a jones for getting grades early in life.  Which is fine, but again, merely a sign of what she was like in her late teens and early twenties.
• Edited the Yale Law Review: This is one of those things that makes lawyers all tingly.  It means she could write and edit coherently and brown-nose fluently, as near as I can tell. What does it mean to one’s skill as a jurist, as opposed to “law student?”
• First Latina appointed to a Federal court in New York: So are we to believe that being Hispanic is an obstacle when combined with being a Yale Law grad?
• Bipartisan Support!  Appointed by Bush I, promoted by Clinton!: Well, that’s half right.  George HW Bush may have been a Republican, but he was no conservative. He also appointed Justice Souter, for crying out loud; he was obviously pretty clueless about judges.
• First Latina SCOTUS nominee: So we year.  It’s been in all the papers.

So is that, alone, supposed to tell all of us dissenters to just sit down and shut up about the rulings she’s made to which we object?  Do we peasants get to exercise our First Amendment rights, still?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 6:48 am and is filed under President Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.