Skip to main content

The most judicious examination of Judge Sotomayor I've seen anywhere...

... and I'm pretty proud that it was penned by a Libertarian.

Everyone will have to get by Gene Healy's first paragraph, because frankly it sounds like it came out of a conservative talking points memo, so I will give it here, just to get it out of the way:

Most sane Americans are sick of identity politics. More's the pity, then, that race and gender will likely take center stage in the coming Supreme Court fight. If so, Sonia Sotomayor can hardly cry victim: She's fed the fire by repeatedly suggesting that women and minorities read the Constitution differently than white males.


[For the record, just as Biblical scholars have acknowledged within the last century that women and minorities read the Bible differently than European males, and feminist historians and sociologists have proven that female researchers will ask different questions of the same evidence, there is intellectual merit to the idea that people of different backgrounds read all documents differently. That said, Judge Sotomayor has strayed into the exploitive realm of ID politics from time to time. Big shit.]

But it's what follows that makes the Healy piece worth reading, a fairly comprehensive examination of where Sotomayor has come down on different issues.

Here's a taste:

The Second Circuit, Sotomayor's home for the last 11 years, gets few national security cases. But what we can glean from three key cases she's participated in suggests she agrees with former Justice Sandra O'Connor that the War on Terror "is not a blank check for the president."

A Justice Sotomayor is unlikely to move in lockstep with the ACLU in this area. In Cassidy v. Chertoff (2006), she rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to post-9/11 security searches conducted by a ferry operator acting at the behest of the Bush administration.

But in 2008's Doe v. Mukasey, she joined two colleagues to strike down provisions of the Patriot Act related to National Security Letters (NSL). NSLs allow the FBI to seize private customer information from ISPs and other businesses, and place the recipient under a "gag order," preventing disclosure of the demand.

Still before the Second Circuit is the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen sent to Syria under the U.S. government's extraordinary rendition program and tortured there. At oral argument last December, Sotomayor questioned the administration's lawyer sharply: "So the minute the executive raises the specter of foreign policy, it is the government's position that that is a license to torture?"

Sotomayor is unlikely to participate in the final decision, but her line of questioning suggested skepticism toward broad claims of executive power. That record isn't much to go on, but it hints that Sotomayor won't be as pro-executive as recent GOP nominees.


In the end, Healy reaches the following conclusion:

For all her faults, it's unlikely that Sonia Sotomayor will be a pushover for any wartime president. Constitutionalists and civil libertarians should take comfort in the fact that it could have been worse.


Perhaps only a lukewarm endorsement, but the nice part of the article is that it actually gives you sufficient information to make up your own mind on many issues.

Comments

ChrisNC said…
Gene isn't a Libertarian. He's an officer of the Constitution Party of New York. That doesn't make what he said bad, of course. I just mention it for the sake of accuracy.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?