The surest sign the White House isn’t worried at all about whether Sonia Sotomayor will win confirmation to the Supreme Court came on Thursday afternoon, a few hours after Sotomayor had finished enduring three days of mind-numbingly repetitive questions from the 19 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
All week, the major Republican line of attack against her has been a simple one: She’s racially biased, and she won’t judge fairly and impartially. To prove that, the GOP has relied on a handful of speeches and her ruling in one controversial case out of New Haven, Conn., which found the city had acted properly by throwing out the results of a promotion exam for firefighters over concern that minority candidates were disproportionately likely to fail it; the Supreme Court overturned Sotomayor’s ruling earlier this summer. And to make sure the point was driven home without any danger of subtlety, Republicans arranged for two of the firefighters to testify, calling them as witnesses in the Thursday afternoon portion of the hearing that dealt with Sotomayor’s record and qualifications.
Looking sharp in their dress blue uniforms, the firefighters, Frank Ricci and Ben Vargas, had a sympathetic story to tell; Republicans must have been praying the Democrats on the committee would attack the two of them in the course of defending Sotomayor. But the majority side didn’t take the bait — they knew they’d already won, so why bother? They made nice instead. “I personally want to thank you for being here,” Sen. Ben Cardin, of Maryland, told Ricci and Vargas. “You put a face on the issues … you have really added to today’s hearing by your personal stories.” With even Jeff Sessions, the leading Republican on the panel, conceding that the GOP won’t try to stop Sotomayor’s confirmation, there was no reason for administration officials to tell Democrats to play hardball with the witnesses.
Of course, that only underscored the extent to which their presence at the witness table was a cheap political stunt. Ricci and Vargas made up a panel with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and Leadership Conference on Civil Rights CEO Wade Henderson, as well as two other GOP witnesses, Peter Kirsanow — a member of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission — and Linda Chavez, an anti-affirmative action activist. The crowded panel made for a disjointed question-and-answer session (made worse because Bloomberg strolled in late, interrupting things), and it was immediately clear that Ricci and Vargas were mostly being used as props. Even the Republicans barely asked them any questions.
In the end, only one senator, Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat, even attempted to raise the one question that would have actually explained their presence. “Do you have any reason to think that Judge Sotomayor acted in anything other than good faith in trying to reach a fair decision in the case?” Specter asked Ricci.
Ricci — finally given the chance to stick it to the “wise Latina” judge who, in the GOP’s feverish imagination, at least, had tried to ruin his life — took a pass. “That’s beyond my legal expertise,” he said, without hesitating. “I am not an attorney or a legal scholar. I simply welcome an invitation by the United States Senate to come here today.” For the most part, Ricci didn’t try to make any sweeping claims about justice, or about race. Some of his opening statement sounded like it was meant for a different hearing, one on federal grants to local first responders: “The structures we respond to today are more dangerous, constructed with lightweight components that are prone to early collapse, and we face fires that can double in size every 30 to 60 seconds.”
But just because Ricci and Vargas didn’t get beaten up by Democrats at all didn’t mean they escaped the hearings unscathed. After a whole week of uncomfortable, resentment-ridden discussion of race in America, the GOP still had a little bit of awkwardness left. “I just want you to know if the country that we’re probably one generation removed to where no matter how hard you study, based on your last name or the color of your skin, you’d have no shot,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told Ricci. “And we’re trying to find some balance … please don’t lose sight of the fact not so very long ago, the test was rigged a different way.”
That was a fair point, and a lot closer to a defense of affirmative action than anyone on the Democratic side offered Ricci. But then Graham turned to Vargas, who joined Ricci’s lawsuit even though he is, himself, Puerto Rican. Vargas had testified that he wanted to help prove that opportunity truly is equal; he had passed the New Haven promotion exam, even if some other minority applicants hadn’t, and he wanted to be dealt with as an individual, not a “racial statistic.” Graham, apparently, didn’t entirely see it that way.
“Mr. Vargas, you’re one generation removed from where your last name would have been [enough to deny him the job]. Do you understand that?” Graham asked. He pushed further, asking what happened when Vargas joined the lawsuit. “Did people call you an Uncle Tom? People thought you were disloyal to the Hispanic community?” Vargas answered yes, sounding a little uncomfortable, and Graham kept going. “Quite frankly, my friend, I think you’ve done a lot for American-Hispanic community,” Graham said. “My hat’s off to you.”
The rest of the panel offered pretty much exactly what you might expect. Chavez, who’s made a career out of insisting — against all available evidence — that America really is the colorblind paradise Republicans say they want, dredged up Sotomayor’s college thesis to build a case against her; it was the sort of stuff people threw against Michelle Obama during last year’s campaign. “It is clear from [Sotomayor's] record that she has drunk deep from the well of identity politics,” Chavez warned. “I know a lot about that well, and I can tell you that it is dark and poisonous.”
But as with Ricci and Vargas, almost no one took the bait. Any energy and drama that had been left in the hearing room were finally spent. By the time the hearing rolled past 6 p.m. Eastern, the crowd had dwindled, and there were hardly any reporters or members of the public left to listen to even less controversial GOP witnesses as they tried everything from guns to abortion to French law to fear of crime to ignite the culture wars again. This fight has been over since before it began; President Obama had stacked the deck too neatly. Four days of hearings demonstrated what everyone already knew about Sotomayor: She’s obviously qualified, she’s not remotely the radical activist the right says she is, and her appointment as the first Latina justice truly will make history. The only question left by the end of the day Thursday was exactly when the Senate would get around to making her confirmation official.
On Sunday in a New York Times editorial titled “The Mismeasure of Woman,” former Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman — whose magazine folded six months ago, almost to the day – argued that women have been toiling under the collective delusion of progress. We have fooled ourselves by defining our gains “too narrowly.” We have focused on the “numbers at the expense of attitudes.” Lately, there has been a lot of noise about the Shriver Report, with its cheerful pronouncement that, in 40 percent of families, women are the primary breadwinners; about the “He-cession” that has hit men harder than women (hardly positive news, but certainly thought-provoking); about Pelosi and Clinton and Sotomayor and the 17 female senators and 74 women in the House. But none of that is indicative of the actual state of the female union, not when (as Lipman points out) Hillary Clinton can still be mocked for her “cankles” and Keith Olbermann can call Michelle Malkin “a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” “In recent years,” writes Lipman, “progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.”
Since the article published, Lipman has been taken to task for her tendentiousness and factual inaccuracies, for her “gratingly pompous” tone and “insanely massive overwhelming ego” — her ego, I have to confess, was refreshing — as well as her bizarre argumentative mash-up connecting 9/11 to the supposed flame-out of female advancement. (This argument, a colleague of mine pointed out, was first made by Susan Faludi, though I would say not very convincingly then, either.) But what of Lipman’s declaration that cultural attitudes toward women have regressed? Have they gone the way of the caveman in recent years?
It’s unlikely there’s a woman who writes for a living, or whose work has made her subject to public judgment of any kind — hell, it’s unlikely there’s a woman living in America today — who would argue with the assertion that the “conversation online about women” is “just plain ugly,” as Lipman writes. She tells readers that she has been called “a witch and a bimbo.” Most women, at some point in their lives, publicly or privately, have been insulted similarly, or worse. (When I wrote for Salon about my faulty iPhone, the reaction was overwhelmingly sexist, with letter writers calling me, in various colorful phrases, a dumb girl.) The Internet, of course, is a magnifying glass for all forms of vituperation, with bloggers and commentators drawing on a rich fund of misogynist language. And the sexist talk of male media personalities, including many of the supposedly liberal persuasion — Keith Olbermann and David Letterman and Chris Matthews and Bill Maher — is often shocking, especially when they are criticizing women reviled by their fellow liberals, like Michelle Malkin or Sarah Palin (or Hillary Clinton).
This sort of abuse needs to end. But are the attitudes on display new? Didn’t the Internet just provide a novel, free, easy-access, anonymous pasture for the age-old dinosaur of sexism to roam? Perhaps more to the point, do such attitudes, even if they are more public or available or distributable than they once were, indicate a corresponding stall-out of progress? Might they actually be a result of progress? During the presidential election, in an essay I wrote about Hillary Clinton, I argued that the success of her candidacy had brought long-latent fears about women and power to light. The criticism is loudest when the successor is approaching the throne. Seventy-seven cents on the male-earned dollar, or the dearth of women in corporate boardrooms, are indeed pitiful statistics, but I’m not sure they indicate backsliding, or even that progress has ground to a halt. What about the proliferation of feminist Web sites and mommy blogs? What about those women in Congress? What about all the “great news” with which Lipman opens her essay? The picture may not yet be rosy, but I’d still say we are inching along.
Lipman is right to argue for an overhaul of “popular perceptions” vis-à-vis women. In order for women to, well, progress there needs to be a change in the way we are perceived. But for this to happen, we must put an end to the notion that we are fundamentally different or “Other” — a few short steps to “inferior.” Tossing out Lipman’s own gender “exceptionalisms,” as Jezebel’s Anna North calls them, would be a start. Lipman tells us that women are risk-averse (and thus hesitate to ask for things, like raises), that they tend not to laugh at their mistakes, that they are “built to withstand hardship and pain,” and that they “are less likely to define themselves by their job.” I am a ninny about pain, and if I lost my job, my identity would suffer. I know I’m not alone. Friends who work as accountants and software executives and real estate agents in the Midwest, where I was raised — women who, unlike me, have children and houses and husbands — would feel the same. My mother, who runs a marketing company, tells me her female employees do in fact ask for promotions and raises, often with a greater sense of entitlement than the men. You might say that Lipman’s own attitudes about gender are as antiquated as the more poisonous ones she decries.
Barack Obama made his name by telling us that there aren’t two separate Americas, black and white, but just one United States. Still, knowing the color of a voter’s skin offers a fair amount of information about how that voter feels about the president. Among white voters, it’s been dropping since this spring. Joan Walsh discusses some of the likely reasons, and some of the possible inflection points, in her blog; here, we’re simply going to look at the numbers, and then look at what was happening in the political world while those numbers were being collected. Using Gallup polling data, the following charts show how President Obama’s approval rating broke down among white, nonwhite, black and Hispanic poll respondents, and how those figures changed as specific key events occurred.
July 13: The Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.
July 15: Sen. Tom Coburn tells Judge Sotomayor, “You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Date
White
Nonwhite
Black
Hispanic
July 13-19
51
81
94
79
July 20: The first notable disruption of a congressional home district meeting occurs, when a Birther hijacks Delaware Rep. Mike Castle’s attempt to discuss healthcare with constituents.
July 20: The arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his Cambridge, Mass. home becomes public.
July 21: The president comments on the arrest in a press conference, saying the police acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates.
July 22: Liz Cheney attempts to justify Birtherism on CNN, saying, “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”
July 24: Obama says of his comments on the Gates arrest, “I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”
Date
White
Nonwhite
Black
Hispanic
July 20-26
47
79
95
72
July 28: Birther frenzy reaches an approximate peak.
July 28: The Senate Judiciary Committee votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.
July 29: Obama redoubles his healthcare sales pitch, holding public meetings in Raleigh, N.C., and Bristol, Va.
July 30: Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. Joseph Crowley go to the White House for a beer with the president and vice president.
Date
White
Nonwhite
Black
Hispanic
July 27-Aug 2
46
76
94
68
Aug 3: Members of Congress on recess find hostile, combative crowds at town halls.
Aug 6: The full Senate votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.
Aug 7: Sarah Palin worries, in public, about “death panel” measures in the healthcare reform proposals.
Date
White
Nonwhite
Black
Hispanic
Aug 3-9
47
79
96
77
Aug 11: William Kostric brings his 9 mm pistol to the president’s town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H. He carries a sign saying, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” and seems to touch off a trend of bearing arms to town halls.
Date
White
Nonwhite
Black
Hispanic
Aug 10-16
46
73
92
69
Aug 22: Obama denounces “outrageous myths” about healthcare reform.
Clunk, clunk, clunk. Say what you will about the perticklers of health care reform or the New Haven firefighters’ test. What I hear today is the sound of yet another barrier falling. And today, I especially like the sound of this: ”It is this nation’s faith in a more perfect union that allows a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx to stand here now.”
The newest member of the Supreme Court was welcomed to the bench today by the man who appointed her. President Barack Obama held a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House to congratulate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
There’s nothing earth-shattering in either of their prepared statements, but this little segment from her remarks is worth reading:
Mr. President, I have the most heartfelt appreciation for the trust that you’ve placed in me by nominating me. And I want to convey my thanks to the Judiciary Committee, led by Chairperson Leahy, for conducting a respectful and timely hearing, and to all members of the Senate for approving the President’s selection. I am so grateful to all of you for this extraordinary opportunity.
I am most grateful to this country. I stand here today knowing that my confirmation as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court would never have been possible without the opportunities presented to me by this nation. More than two centuries ago, in a Constitution that contains fewer than 5,000 words, our founders set forth their vision for this new land. Their self-proclaimed task was to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity. Over the years, the ideals at the heart of that document have endured, as subsequent generations have expanded those blessings, these rights and freedoms to more and more Americans.
It’s standard operating procedure to marvel at the Constitution and how great and open and opportunity-filled America is. Lots of politicians and appointees say such things. It just rings a little more true when the first Latina Supreme Court justice, rather than the latest hotshot Federalist Society lawyer, says it.
Bring on her wise Latina jurisprudence. Now, please, get to work, Justice Sotomayor.
WASHINGTON — A conservative group wants its members to be alert — Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court could lead to very dangerous things.
“We just received word that the [National Council of] La Raza supporters are jubilant and arranging immediate celebrations and festivities for their wins,” Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, a vehemently nativist group that’s been active fighting attempts to reform the immigration system in recent years, said in an e-mail Thursday afternoon. “Those of you in areas of dense illegal immigration might have a rowdy night on your hands.”
Sotomayor, of course, was born in the Bronx, and besides, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens — so strictly speaking, she has nothing to do with immigration at all. But why should that get in the way of a good scare? “What do you think Obama and the Globalists plan to do to Americans next?” the e-mail asks. (Americans such as… Sotomayor, presumably.)
“Resistance to Sotomayor’s nomination was considered light by Senate staffers due to their ability to convince most Americans that resistance was futile,” the e-mail continues. “We expect this same PSYOPS technique to be used in the push for Amnesty next. Many thanks to all of you that called, e-mailed, faxed, and fought bravely. If more of our fellow Americans had joined us we could have prevailed.”
The group is soliciting comments from its members on the Sotomayor vote here, if you want to read more in the same vein.
