Supreme Court nominee illustrates the American Dream. The Republican Party hates her. Of course.
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President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court.
If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.
Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network…
Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last 11 years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation’s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York…
Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.
Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering private practice.
But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush.
That appointment was made by a Republican who was a conservative – not a neocon mouthpiece.
It’s not out of line that a traditional conservative Republican appointed her. Her life is a Horatio Alger story – the sort that inspired generations of Americans to aspire for a better life, willing to fight for a nation that lived up to the standards of our history.
Previously approved by two bi-partisan efforts in Congress, no doubt the Party of “NO” will waste a couple of months on preaching their ideology, trying to stop her appointment to the bench.
