Patiently, Sotomayor Schools GOP Senators

Posted by Jill Filipovic, RH Reality Check at 8:00 AM on July 17, 2009.

If there's one thing that this week's Senate confirmation hearings made clear, it's that Judge Sotomayor is not just a great mind, but a patient and generous teacher.  Surrounded by senators who seemed primarily concerned with topping each other in condescension, Sotomayor responded with respect, nuance and a solid grounding in the law - to the point where the hearings sometimes felt like a high school civics class, with Sotomayor explaining the fundamentals of our legal system.  The biggest surprises of the hearings so far haven't come from Sotomayor herself, but from the ignorance and arrogance shown by some members of the GOP.  And the biggest pay-off won't just be from Sotomayor's confirmation - although that will certainly happen - but from the GOP's torching of any goodwill it hasn't already set aflame with women and racial minorities. 

In the hearings, Sotomayor faced down Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator with a notoriously racially troubled past.  Sessions sat in Sotomayor's seat when Ronald Regan nominated him for a federal judgeship.  The Senate Judiciary Committee killed his nomination after it came to light that he joked that he used to think the Ku Klux Klan wasn't so bad until he found out some of them smoked marijuana, and he believed the NAACP and the ACLU to be "un-American and "Communist-inspired" - his biggest grievance with the groups being that they "forced" civil rights down our collective throats.  Watching Sotomayor respond to Sessions' sneering questions with insightful and polite answers was simultaneously infuriating and inspiring - I'm not sure I could have been nearly as composed, but she certainly put to rest any concerns about her "temperament."   

Or at least, she put those concerns to rest in the minds of reasonable people.  Sen. Lindsey Graham wasn't satisfied, and had the nerve to read off several anonymous and unattributed statements about Sotomayor's "temperament problem." His point was that Sotomayor is too mean and too harsh in her questioning to be a good judge - a concern rarely raised with aggressive male judges like Antonin Scalia.  But instead of making her look unreasonable or "temperamental" (what is she, a racehorse?), he succeeded only in making himself look like a bully and a fool, targeting her personality instead of her record. Like many others in the GOP, he threw in some references to her "Wise Latina" comment for good measure - after all, someone in the studio audience may not be aware that she's not white. 

And it only went downhill on Wednesday.  Abortion-related queries predictably came up on both days, but were driven home with staunch anti-choice Sen. Tom Coburn's line of questioning.  After asking her about the current state of abortion laws in the United States as if he didn't know - there's that condescension again - Coburn took the hearings as an opportunity to lecture her, saying, "I don't expect you to answer this, but I do expect you to pay attention to it as you contemplate these big issues," before fixating on viability and fetal heartbeats.   

Can you picture Sen. Coburn rhetorically shaking his finger like that at Scalia or Chief Justice Roberts? 

If that wasn't enough, Coburn then told Sotomayor, "You'll have lots of 'splainin' to do" in a back-and-forth about the Second Amendment and self-defense.  Only in our "post-racial" era can old white men criticize a highly-educated, accomplished Latina jurist for being "racist" and not adequately colorblind, accuse her of being an affirmative action pick, and then throw a Ricky Ricardo quote at her.  

But perhaps the most offensive aspect of the hearings was some of the senators' blatant misrepresentations and feigned ignorance of the law.  Senator Coburn's request that Sotomayor explain the status of abortion rights was just the tip of the iceberg.  In his line of questioning on Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked Sotomayor her opinion on judges "reading rights into the Constitution."  Certainly Sen. Hatch is familiar with the Ninth Amendment, which states simply that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" - in other words, just because a right isn't explicitly delineated in the Constitution doesn't mean that the government is free to violate it.  Even more egregious was Sen. Graham's contention that the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, on whose board Sotomayor sat, argued in a brief that refusing to use taxpayer funds for abortion is akin to slavery.  In fact, PRLDEF used the infamous Dredd v. Scott case to make the point that the anti-abortion law in question treated poor women as less than citizens under the law - the same mistake notoriously made in Dredd. 

Throughout it all, though, Sotomayor remained poised and calm, answering the questions thoughtfully and thoroughly - much the same way she writes her opinions.  Her knowledge of the law, her preparation and her presentation were absolute perfection - and serve as another example of a woman of color having to do things twice as well as everyone else in order to succeed (and she still has her intelligence, temperament and aptitude questioned).   

There is almost no doubt that she will be confirmed.  What remains to be seen is just how much damage these hearings will do to an already battered Republican Party.  If Democrats are smart, they will replay these clips ad nauseum, and let all of America - and not just the nerds who streamed CSPAN at work - see just how Republicans act when they sit face-to-face with a woman of color (especially one whose accomplishments trump their own and may in their eyes be a little too big for her britches).  I wonder what the female, non-white or even rudimentarily racially aware GOP constituents will think when they see the condescension and disdain heaped upon a woman who graciously responds with nothing but patience and tolerance.   

I suspect the senators will have some "splainin" to do. 

Tagged as: gop, supreme court, lindsey graham, sotomayor

Jill Filipovic is a New York-based freelance writer and a law student at NYU. More of her writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.