Will Obama's Pick of Sotomayor Split the Right?

By David Corn, MotherJones.com. Posted May 26, 2009.

With President Barack Obama's nomination of federal appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, conservatives could have a blistering fight on their hands--among themselves.

As news leaked of the Sotomayor appointment, the Judicial Confirmation Network, a conservative outfit, released a statement from its counsel, Wendy E. Long, blasting Sotomayor:

Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.  She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one's sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.

She reads racial preferences and quotas into the Constitution, even to the point of dishonoring those who preserve our public safety....

She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.

Long is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and her group is run by a fellow named Gary Marx, who worked for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004 and who was also a fundraiser for a social conservative group affiliated with religious right leader James Dobson. The Judicial Confirmation Network's quick opposition to Sotomayor--it aired ads against her before she was even picked by Obama--is an indication that the the Christian right is preparing for battle. As soon as Obama publicly named Sotomayor, two fundamentalist leaders and militant antiabortion crusaders--Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition and Rev. Rob Schenck of Faith and Action--held a prayer service in front of the Supreme Court to oppose the appointment. Concerned Women for America, a mainstay of the fundamentalist right, derided Sotomayor's "immodest bias," criticizing her for having remarked that a "'Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

But will the social conservatives eager for a fight over Sotomayor be supported by others on the right, as they try to block the appointment of the first Latina Supreme Court justice, whose life story (from housing project to Supreme Court!) is full of triumph-over-adversity inspiration?

Not everyone on the right appears eager for a war over Sotomayor. On May 1, conservative pundit and strategist Bill Kristol gave a talk to the DC lawyers' chapter of the Federalist Society, the preeminent conservative legal group. (Members include Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr.) He said that Sotomayor would be hard to oppose, noting her Hispanic background and pointing out that she was first appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush. Kristol called her an attractive candidate and predicted she would sail through the confirmation process, with minimal Republican resistance. He did not believe Sotomayor would galvanize a meaningful opposition and did not encourage a full-scale campaign against her.

His remarks seemed in sync with the sentiment of the crowd in the room. The conservative lawyers at the event appeared more concerned about the ideological balance of the court and realized that any Obama pick would likely be a liberal-minded jurist replacing liberal-minded Justice David Souter. One prominent Federalist Society official said that he doubted that any fight over Sotomayor (or any other candidate then on Obama's short list) would galvanize conservatives.

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David Corn is the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and the co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush. He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.

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