GOP Race Mongering on Sotomayor

The Republicans are still frozen in
fight-or-flight at the precipice of race. President Obama's nomination
of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has leading members of the GOP
peering down, looking nervously at each other, deciding whether they
should follow Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and their
audiences into the abyss, or whether any of them will spread their arms
in a blocking motion to slowly move everyone back to political sanity.

Hard-line
Republicans and radio right-wingers think they have a disqualifying
"gotcha" on Sotomayor's 2001 statement that a "wise Latina woman" can
make "better" legal decisions than a "white male who hasn't lived that
life." Sure, Sotomayor could have skipped "wise" and "better." She
could have said that any member of any group that historically suffered
discrimination or poverty might view certain cases through a different
lens than people who experienced neither bias nor want. Dare we say
empathy?

Obama, while
saying Sotomayor on further reflection might have restated the remark,
said, "If you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote,
what's clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences
will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people
are going through that will make her a good judge."

But
let's not confuse things with the entire sweep of context, especially
when it comes to a Republican Party that has been the party of racial
code words ever since Nixon's Southern Strategy for white males,
Reagan's "state's rights" speech in Mississippi, and President George
W. Bush's siding with white students against affirmative action in the
University of Michigan Supreme Court case. Never mind that in American
History 101 you can remind yourself that America lived 76 years with
slavery after the adoption of the Constitution, 133 years before white
women received the right to vote, 177 years and 178 years before the
racial civil rights and voting acts, and 203 years before the Americans
With Disabilities Act. We are currently debating if gay and lesbian
people are full citizens under the law. Could it be because too many
courts historically contained too few people who lived the lives of
others?

Context is a canard
for Limbaugh, who compared Sotomayor to former Klan leader and
Republican politician David Duke. Gingrich called her a "Latina woman
racist." Buchanan called Sotomayor, a graduate of Princeton and Yale
law school and an appointee of GOP President George H.W. Bush, a . . .
duh! . . . affirmative-action baby!

The
question is, how far will Republicans let such race mongering go to
further ruin their "brand," at a time when recent polling shows an
unprecedented majority of African-Americans and white Americans both
saying race relations are generally good? A May Gallup poll found that
since 2001, the Republicans have turned an eight-point advantage in
party identification into a five-point deficit. Most striking are the
Republican losses among college graduates, turning a one-point
advantage (47 percent to 46 percent) into a 15-point deficit (52-37).

So
far, no top Republican on Capitol Hill has repudiated the attacks based
on race. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said, "I've got better
things to do than be the speech police." The top Republican on the
Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions, merely said he would not
have used Limbaugh's or Gingrich's "loaded words," but when asked
directly on NBC if he thought Sotomayor was a racist, Sessions said, "I
think that she is a person who believes that her background can
influence her decision. That's what troubles me."

Hmmm. Would Barack Obama be president had he stuck to having better things to do than be the speech police on Jeremiah Wright?

Most
indications are that Sotomayor will ultimately be confirmed, given that
moderate Republicans like Maine's Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted
for her elevation to the federal appeals bench in 1998. It would be
better still if the likes of Snowe and Collins and fellow Republicans
with the least bit of courage called a press conference to condemn the
race trashing of Sotomayor. The more they stay silent, the more they
might as well leap off the precipice.