Today on Fox News, Karl Rove questioned whether Sonia Sotomayer had the intellect to be on the Supreme Court:
I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be, she has not been very strong on the second circuit.
To make such a judgment, Karl Rove must be a real heavyweight, right? Let's compare their records.
Sonia Sotomayor:
Cardinal Spellman High School, Valedictorian
BA, Princeton, Pyne Prize, Summa Cum Laude, 1976 (age 22)
JD, Yale University, Editor of Law School Journal, 1979 (age 25)
Karl Rove:
Olympus High School, Student Council President, 2 years
Entered University of Utah, 1969, age 19, dropped out 1971
University of Maryland, 1971, withdrew first semester
George Mason University, 1973, dropped out
University of Texas, Austin, 1977, dropped out
Karl Rove has no college degree, and his inferiority complex is showing. Now, I am not one who thinks a college degree is the only measure of intelligence, but it is absurd for someone with Rove's academic record to question the intelligence of someone with Sotomayor's academic record. Unlike Bush, Sodomayer did not just attend Yale, she excelled. She has excelled at all her academic endeavors at institutions known for accepting some of the brightest students.
On the question of impartiality in adjudication, there is no such thing. Law is not a mathematical science. If it were, we would not need a Supreme Court to decide cases, because the answer could be determined through a provable formula. Or you could plug all the factors into a computer and get one outcome.
If adjudication were impartial, you would get the same outcome always, no matter who sat on the bench. As we know, this does not happen; Supreme Courts have reversed decisions of earlier Supreme Courts on multiple occasions.
All jurists make decisions subjectively, based on their view of the law, which as Sotomayor correctly said, is shaped by a person's background and characteristics.
There is this absurd notion that white men are neutral judges by default. That is because bigoted people, as many republicans are, think white men are the status quo and everything must be measured against their experiences and perceptions. This is why they oppose affirmative action, oppose equal rights amendments, and even oppose abortion. Republicans eschew empathy--clearly--and cannot put themselves in the shoes of those who are not like them, nor do they feel the need to.
Instead, they think the original system created and implemented by white men is how things are supposed to be and anything that deviates from that system is a bias for someone else. They do not seem to comprehend that if the original system had been shaped with input from other races and from women, or without the input of white men, the "base" system would have been significantly different.
Finally, if we are only interested in objective impartial adjuciation (something that simply does not exist), what is the point of a diverse court?
The current court members make their own "personal" views clear in their rulings, such as the religious, heterosexual Antonin Scalia's vitriolic support for a Texas law outlawing sodomy, in which he suggested striking it down would lead to pedophilia, bestiality, and incest.
I do not know enough about Sotomayor to say she is the right person for the job. But the fact that conservatives are using such flimsy arguments to try to discredit her suggests that she has not really done a lot they can complain about.
The truth is they would have opposed any nominee Obama suggested who was not an ideological carbon copy of Roberts, Scalia, or Alito. Their only interest is to try to knock Obama's star out of the heavens before the next presidential election through obstruction and obfuscation.
UPDATE: I changed white, heterosexual Scalia to religious, heterosexual Scalia, because I meant to describe aspects of his character that might affect how he weighs a case on sodomy. I am not saying it DID determine the outcome, but surely if he were homosexual, he might have taken a different view of a law against sodomy.