OBAMA'S MOST BRILLIANT APPOINTMENT

The Bear Writes

Obama's Most Brilliant Appointment

The current hearings on the appointment of Sonia Maria Sotomayor have allowed President Obama the opportunity to showcase not only a brilliant, experienced, moderate jurist, but more importantly, this has been an opportunity to showcase the GOP's grasping at straws only to be racist and contrary at their own expense.

On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice David Souter. If confirmed, she would be the Court's 111th justice, its first Hispanic justice, and its third female justice, according to Wikipedia.

Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent and was born in the Bronx. Her father died when she was nine, and she was thereafter raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with an A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1976 and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She was an advocate for the hiring of Latino faculty at both schools. She worked as an Assistant District Attorney in New York for five years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992.

Sotomayor has ruled on several high-profile cases. In 1995, she issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 baseball strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster's final note. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor has heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and has written about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.

The AP reported Sonia Sotomayor pushed back vigorously against Republican charges that she would bring bias and a liberal agenda to her seat as the first Hispanic woman on the Supreme Court, insisting repeatedly she would be impartial as GOP senators tried to undercut her with her own words from past speeches.

For all the pointed questioning in a grueling, daylong hearing, there was little doubt that President Barack Obama's first high court choice — with solid backing from the Democrats and their lopsided Senate majority — would be confirmed. Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said as much — and predicted she would receive at least some Republican backing.