American Patrol

One of the most interesting things about the just-completed confirmation hearings for Judge Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation as Supreme Court Justice is how few people, in the final analysis, actually cared about them. With Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation a foregone conclusion on the part of even the Republican opposition before the hearings had even begun, television viewership for the actual hearings was at 3 a.m. penile enhancement infomercial levels. Those trying to keep up on the hearings by watching the evening news reports were treated to the journalistic equivalent of those “blooper reels” that get included as extras on DVDs, to wit…

"We're going to do that crack cocaine thing that you and I have talked about before."
--Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to Wayne Henderson, President, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, 7/16/09

I had noted, in a previous post on this subject, that Senator Sessions was a cracker-ass bigot who was morally unfit for his office. I neglected to mention that he is also an idiot.

Apart from these moments of “Republicans Say The Darndest Things,” the hearings basically consisted of predictable Democratic soft ball pitches—underhand slo-pitch for you Park League sports fans—and the sound of Republicans playing dead horse percussion on the “Wise Latina” remark and the Ricci case. Ricci himself appeared before the Committee on Thursday, for no apparent reason. The Supreme Court had already reversed the Ricci decision before the hearings started, throwing out the underlying precedents—which most legal experts believed the Appeals Court panel that included Sotomayor had accurately followed—and Ricci’s contribution to the discourse consisted largely of reminding the panel that he was neither an attorney nor a legal expert. His role, as seen by the Republican committee members who had invited him, was to drum up some empathy to be used against the nominee, who in their view was unqualified for the Supreme Court because she might… use empathy in her judgments. His actual role seems to have been as an unwitting symbol of the bad faith with which the Republicans approached both the hearings and the nomination.

Sotomayor’s confirmation by the full Senate—including a number of Republicans who have announced their intention or are otherwise likely to vote for her—will occur before the August recess. The nation will, presumably, survive it.