Will Obama's Pick of Sotomayor Split the Right?

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

It's possible that the right is heading toward a split between those who want to Bork President Obama's first Supreme Court pick--blasting her for a decision siding with the city of New Haven in a discrimination case brought by white firefighters who objected to the deep-sixing of a promotion exam that yielded low scores for minorities--and those conservatives who don't see the political gain in trying to destroy the first female Hispanic appointee when the Democrats have a large majority in the Senate. Some leading conservative voices have dumped on her. Karl Rove assailed her as a liberal, activist judge who does not have the "intellectual powers" to make a difference on the court. National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru tagged her "Obama's Harriet Miers." Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee criticized the Sotomayor choice as "the clearest indication yet that President Obama's campaign promises to be a centrist and think in a bipartisan way were mere rhetoric. Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the 'Extreme Court' that could mark a major shift." But this hardly signals that mainstream conservatives--and, most important, Senate Republicans--are gearing up to go after Sotomayor and annihilate her. And GOP chair Michael Steele cautioned a slow and deliberate response, saying "Republicans will reserve judgment on Sonia Sotomayor until there has been a thorough and thoughtful examination of her legal views."

No doubt, cable TV conservatives will decry Sotomayor's decisions and chide Obama for citing her real-world experience as "a necessary ingredient in the kind of justice we need on the Supreme Court." And there will be rightwing advocacy groups exploiting the moment by sending out dire-sounding direct mail and blast emails to raise money off this pick. But all this does not make for a concerted and coordinated opposition the White House has to fret about. If Republicans do end up deciding that a major fight against Sotomayor is not in their best political interests, that surely will disappoint some of their comrades on the right--and that could spark a nasty intra-movement squabble. (Huckabee may have his first issue for the 2012 GOP presidential primaries.) By selecting Sotomayor, Obama is forcing Senate GOPers to choose between attacking a Hispanic appointee (and possibly alienating Hispanic voters) and ticking off social conservatives. At the moment, the GOPers' calculation seems obvious. But it could come at a cost of a cat-fight on the right.

Additional reporting by Stephanie Mencimer.

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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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