Sotomayor Expected To Be Confirmed Today

Powerline:

The Senate will likely vote today on whether to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as a Justice of the Supreme Court. 31 Republicans have announced that they will vote not to confirm her. One Republican, Sen. Voinovich, says he's still undecided. The eight who have said they will vote for confirmation are Alexander, Bond, Collins, Graham, Gregg, Lugar, Martinez, and Snowe

My understanding is that no Democrats will vote "no." However, I don't know whether Senators Byrd and Kennedy will be able to vote.

Thus, it appears that 66-69 Senators will vote in favor of Sotomayor and that this will include less than one-fourth of the Republican caucus.

Some readers might be wondering why I've been following the head count so closely. Why, it is fair to ask, does it matter whether the Sotomayor nomination garners 66 votes as opposed to, say, 76?

I think it matters because of the signal the final count sends to President Obama. If he understands that Republicans are no longer granting much deference to the president's selection, and will resist confirming left-liberal nominees even when they are relatively appealing minority group members, then he may think twice about sending up a nominee as liberal, or more so, than Sotomayor when the next vacancy arises.

This hope may be a longshot while the Dems hold 60 Senate seats. But the next time Obama has the opportunity to nominate a Justice, the Republicans may occupy significantly more seats. In that event, the Sotomayor vote suggests that, if Obama sends up a hard-core liberal, that nominee may not be confirmed.

I hope so.  For all his faults, John McCain got it right, I think:

Though she attempted to walk back from her long public record of judicial activism during her confirmation hearings, Judge Sotomayor cannot change her record. In a 1996 article in the Suffolk University Law Review, she stated that "a given judge (or judges) may develop a novel approach to a specific set of facts or legal framework that pushes the law in a new direction." Mr. President, it is exactly this view that I disagree with.

 

As a district court judge, her decisions too often strayed beyond settled legal norms. Several times, this resulted in her decisions being overturned by the Second Circuit.  She was reversed due to her reliance on foreign law rather than U.S. law. She was reversed because the Second Circuit found she exceeded her jurisdiction in deciding a case involving a state law claim. She was reversed for trying to impose a settlement in a dispute between businesses. And she was reversed for unnecessarily limiting the intellectual property rights of freelance authors. These are but a few examples that led me to vote against her nomination to the Second Circuit in 1992 because of her troubling record of being an activist judge who strayed beyond the rule of law. 

 

For this reason, I closely followed her confirmation hearing last month. During the hearing, she clearly stated that "as a judge, I don't make law." While I applaud this statement, it does not reflect her record as an appellate court judge....Should she engage in activist decisions that overturn the considered constitutional judgments of millions of Americans, if she uses her lifetime appointment on the bench as a perch to remake law in her own image of justice, I expect that Americans will hold us Senators accountable.

 

Judicial activism demonstrates a lack of respect for the popular will that is at fundamental odds with our republican system of government. And, as I stated earlier, regardless of one's success in academics and in government service, an individual who does not appreciate the common sense limitations on judicial power in our democratic system of government ultimately lacks a key qualification for a lifetime appointment to the bench. For this reason, and no other, I am unable to support Judge Sotomayor's nomination.    

I was disgusted to hear that Missouri's Kit Bond is going to support her nomination.  He said it was because he didn't want to vote against a 'qualified' jurist on political reasons like Obama did.  Well, isn't that nice?  It's spineless morons like Bond that have led the GOP into minority status.  They somehow still haven't figured out that by playing nice with Democrats does not equal them playing nice back.  While she is a judge by education and experience, I would also argue that the fact that Sotomayor's clear endorsement of using international law over the U.S. Constitution and writing policy from the bench do, in fact, prevent her from being a 'qualified' jurist.  And, lying about her record to the Senate panel should not be excused, either.

But that's just me.  Once again, I'm glad Bond will be gone next year.

There's my two cents.