Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Breaking News: Senate Sets Sotomayor Hearing Date for July 13! Nutty GOP Objects Because She is MORE Experienced than Roberts!!

Breaking News from the Washington Post:
Senate Sets Sotomayor Hearing Date
The Senate Judiciary Committee has set a date for the start of confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to be associate justice of the Supreme Court: July 13. "In selecting this date I am trying to be fair to all concerned," said Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in a statement. "I want to be fair to the nominee and allow her the earliest possible opportunity to respond to the attacks made about her character. It is not fair for her critics to be calling her racist without allowing her the opportunity to respond," he continued in an apparent reference to widely covered -- and later retracted -- remarks by former House speaker Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a racist on Twitter. "I do not want to see this historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor treated unfairly or less fairly than the Senate treated the nomination of John Roberts."
A quick hearing is something Republicans had hoped to avoid, with Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee,
saying he thought late summer hearings would be preferable. "I don't think that this should be rushed," he said late last month. "I don't believe we can do this before August."
Leahy appealed to precedent in making his announcement. "This is a schedule that tracks the process the Senate followed by bipartisan agreement in considering President Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court in 2005," Leahy said in a statement on the Senate floor. "....If 48 days were sufficient to prepare for that hearing, in accordance with our agreement and the initial schedule, it is certainly adequate time to prepare for the confirmation hearing for Judge Sotomayor."
Late Breaking News from MSNBC:
GOP OBJECTS TO SOTOMAYOR HEARING DATE
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC today that Senate Republicans will not go along with the timing of July 13 for Sotomayor's confirmation hearing. Grassley said he thinks it's too soon, both for Republicans and Democrats, to go through all of Sotomayor's writings. He said the timing of Sotomayor's hearing can not be compared with John Roberts', because she has been on the bench so much longer than he had been -- and thus has a longer paper trail.
Republicans! They are losing it!!
They are using the fact that she is MORE experienced than John Roberts to request a delay in her hearing! How ludicrous!

11 comments:

ultima said...

Not ludicrous at all. Makes perfect sense. If there are more of her rulings to review,more time will be needed. Nothing could be more logical than that to anyone who is objective.

pcorn54 said...

If Judge Sotomeyor is more experienced than Roberts, then we need to get her confirmed and in Roberts seat.

Wouldn't that make the right wing whackos go ballistic

Defensores de Democracia said...

There is a Lady that came from the most humble origins and extreme poverty, and now is a Great Medical Doctor of Columbia University, New York, She is an Obstetrician bringing children to the World. And she tells us why she loves Sonia Sotomayor and sees her as a reflection of her own success story and happiness helping mothers and motherhood.

Other ladies tell us about the outspoken and uncourteous manner of New Yorkers ( but lovely New Yorkers ) and why Sonia is criticized by sexist macho antifeminists and ugly male chauvinists, They criticize her for being uncourteous in court. In a male they would admire the firmness, and the character. Sheer Hypocrisy and Double Standard.

There are Great District Attorneys, Prosecutors, and Colleages of Sonia writing about the wonders of the Lady and her Intelligence and Character.

And lots of Common People writing about why they identify themselves with Sonia Sotomayor.

Some videos of common people are very naive but show some tenderness and human identification with the Great Lady.

And I am gathering that material here :

Milenials.com

Vicente Duque

ultima said...

Because she is more experienced has nothing to do with her record which has yet to be examined in detail. One has to wonder what the Pro-Sotos are worried about. Is there a skeleton in her closet? Nutty Pro-Sotos object to an orderly process that allows plenty of time to study her record as opposed to her longevity on the bench. Strange reasoning indeed!

ultima said...

Sorry Pcorn. It doesn't work that way. Moreover, it is the quality of her decisions not the volume or her longevity on the bench that counts.

Roberts is Chief Justice for life last time I checked.

ultima said...

Pcorn wrote, "Wouldn't that make the right wing whackos go ballistic?"

Seems like the left wing whackos have already gone ballistic before the hearings have even begun. Are they afraid of due process?

ultima said...

I always wonder about those who argue about experience. Those that do perhaps have 20 years of experience which actually turns out to be 1 year of experience 20 times. There is a difference!

I alway thought quality was more important than quantity. I guess the leftwingers believe the reverse. The quality is yet to be determined. Let the Senate do its work without all the sniping.

ultima said...

The GOP is not objecting because she is more experienced than Roberts. They are objecting to the rush to judgment when an extensive record of decisions is yet to be examined. Some folks will just go out of their way to distort the facts and ignore the rationale. If Soto's record cannot stand on its merits, then she doesn't belong on the Supreme Court. If the heat is too much, get out of the kitchen. What are the Pro-Sotos afraid off. Back off and let the process play out. There is little doubt about the outcome but let's make sure there is no smoking gun.

Dee said...

Ultima,
Your paranoia is getting ahead of itself.

First, you need to acknowledge, the timeframe for the honorable Sotomayor's hearings are similar to the dates of Roberts and Alito.

There has been plenty of time to review her court cases and plenty of people are on it. Don't pretend that this is not true.

The whole issue is, the right wing conservative Republican Senators are doing ALL in their power to delay and stop the nomination of the honorable Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Sorry to disappoint you and the right wing senators, but the honorable Justice Sotomayor will become our next Supreme Court Justice!!

God Bless America!

Defensores de Democracia said...

When Richard Nixon invented "Hispanics" to counter Blacks and recruit new Republicans for elections

This deserves a Nixonite Investigation. So America was not afraid of Hispanics in the Golden Hippy Marihuana LSD Sixties or Hispanics did not exist.

Richard Nixon was a very close friend of Bebé Rebozo and other Cubans, he had a big country mansion at the beach with pleasure yatch in Miami and felt at ease with Latinos.

I have heard comedians like Jon Stewart saying that Richard Nixon was a racist, and I am not sure if Nixon disliked Blacks as this article says :

Los Angeles Times
Judge Sotomayor, a mythic 'Hispanic'


The supposedly racial term was pushed by Nixon to lump distinct Spanish-speaking groups into one voting bloc. There's no such thing, and the judge should be appointed on her merits.

By Jonathan Zimmerman
June 12, 2009

Judge Sotomayor, a mythic 'Hispanic'

Some excerpts :

How did Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans all become Hispanic?

Amid the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, many of these groups joined hands to demand voting rights, bilingual education and social services. Here they received a big assist from an unlikely source: Richard Nixon. Eager to bring Mexicans and other Latino immigrants into the Republican fold, Nixon also saw them as a potential bulwark against black political aspirations.

"All Spanish-speaking Americans share certain characteristics -- a strong family structure, deep ties to the church, which makes them open to an appeal from us," wrote one GOP campaign strategist on the eve of Nixon's 1972 presidential reelection bid. "The Democratic Party is under suspicion for favoring politically potent blacks at the expense of the needs of Spanish-speaking people."

So Nixon threw his weight behind bilingual education, which has since become a bĂȘte noire for the GOP. He also ordered the Census Bureau to add a query on its 1970 form asking whether respondents were "Hispanic," hoping to further solidify this new voting bloc.

Census Bureau officials balked, noting -- correctly -- that the term lacked scientific and historical precision. They also worried that respondents wouldn't recognize it. So the most commonly used census form in 1970 asked respondents if they were of "Spanish" origin, not whether they were Hispanic.

All that would change in 1977, when the Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to classify Americans as one of four races -- white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native or Asian/Pacific Islander -- and also to distinguish between two ethnic categories, "of Hispanic origin" and "not of Hispanic origin." Since then, the census has asked people their race and whether they're Hispanic, which is not listed as a "race" per se.

Increasingly, however, Americans thought of it as such. Government agencies used "Hispanic" alongside "Asian" and "black," making Hispanic into a de facto racial category. Businesses and educational institutions counted Hispanics -- or, sometimes, "Latinos" -- as a race in diversity and affirmative action reports.

Not surprisingly, then, Hispanics became more likely over time to identify themselves as a separate race too. In the mid-1990s, 60% of the respondents to a study of more than 5,000 Latin American immigrants self-identified as "white," for example, but only 20% of their children did so.

Milenials.com

Vicente Duque

. said...

I did some research and found this:
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/nominations/Nominations.htm

Average time from Nomination to confirmation? Roughly 2-3 months.
Her nomination came around May 1st (not sure of the official file date) so she seems to be following the general timeline. Expect her sitting on the bench by late July- early August.

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