I have an article up on RH Reality Check today about the SCOTUS nominations. Check it out. A taste:
Few things excite politics junkies quite as much as an impending Supreme Court nomination – it’s the Kentucky derby for law nerds, with media-makers and talking heads evaluating the experience, legal pedigrees, and even health of the country’s most prominent judges, academics and lawyers. But this nomination process is looking very different from those of the past, in no small part because most of the favorites are female.
Most commentators are placing their bets on Sonia Sotomayor, Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, with Jennifer Granholm, Deval Patrick, Kathleen Sullivan, Cass Sunstein and Janet Napolitano also thrown out as possibilities. The general consensus that Obama’s choice is going to be a woman is not a bad gamble, since women make up more than half of the American public, one-third of all lawyers and thirty percent of lower federal court judges, but occupy only one seat on the current Supreme Court. Troublingly, though, there have been murmurings that this will be Obama’s “woman nomination,” and the “racial nomination” will be next – as if women can’t be both women and of color, and as if the nominees will be little more than tokens.
Someone on the left is fine. A woman would be great. A woman of color even better.
But please, not Sotomayor. Basic respect first amendment is kind of a deal breaker for me and believing that schools have an obligation to promote a “proper respect for authority” which trumps even first amendment communications which occur off school grounds after school hours is simply unacceptable.
Yeah, I’m actually not a Sotomayor fan either. I agree that was a terrible decision. I emailed myself the link to Paul Levinson’s article and meant to include it in the article, and then of course was writing most of it at 1am and forgot.
Oh my god, Jill, how DARE you forget something at 1AM? What do you think this is, a blog you do in your spare t-…wait…nevermind.