Matt Yglesias

New Revelations Raise Questions About Justice Sotomayor’s Temperament

It seems that Sonia Sotomayor celebrated her official ascension to the Supreme Court with a little dance party at the Irish Channel Pub in Chinatown here in DC:

Now as Sommer Mathis notes, this is a terrible bar:

That Sotomayor went out dancing and sang karaoke in a local bar makes us supremely happy. We have high hopes that the justice will quickly become a visible fixture in our city. But Sonia, sweetheart, the Irish Channel? The last resort of visiting hockey fans and tourists staying at the Red Roof Inn who have no better ideas of where to go? DCist will admit to knocking a few pints back at the Irish Channel in emergency situations, but nearly every time we’ve been chased out by the unmistakable ambiance of lonely desperation (or a painfully bad cover band).

The Irish Channel Pub is, technically speaking, the closest bar to my apartment. Consequently, I not only have at times knocked a few pints back there, but have even been known to lean on people to go there. But this is a really bad bar. The worst bar in the city, I would say. Chinatown features any number of not-so-appealing bars, but they’re definitely all better than Irish Channel.

David Brooks Tries to Bring Reason to the Sotomayor Debate

Good for David Brooks:

More than any current member of the Supreme Court, she worked her way up through the furnace levels of the American legal system. [...] She is quite liberal. But there’s little evidence that she is motivated by racialist thinking or an activist attitude. [...] When you read her opinions, race and gender are invisible. I’m obviously not qualified to judge the legal quality of her opinions. But when you read the documents merely as examples of persuasive writing, you find that they are almost entirely impersonal and deracinated.

This should be totally obvious. That it’s not obvious to so many speaks to two things. One is the deranged nature of Supreme Court confirmation battles. Consistent differences have emerged between the kinds of justices conservatives want and the kinds of justices liberals want, but it’s considered out of bounds for politicians to just say “The President has a different ideology from me, he’s appointing a judge whose decisions I anticipate disliking, and that’s one of the reasons I voted for the other guy.” Instead there are these incentives to concoct wild personality defects in the other side’s choices, or accuse them of deliberately subverting the law (”activism”), rather than of simply disagreeing about important issues.

Mix that up with this incredible race obsession held by many white conservatives, and it’s a toxic blend. Suddenly Judge Sotomayor’s participation in 1970s-vintage campus activist groups is a dire threat to the white race’s legal hegemony.

NR’s Sotomayor Cover

Neil Sinhababu has a smart take on the NR Sotomayor cover:

[T]he way I see the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think that definitely captures some of what’s happening here. It should also be said that some of the ugliness of this whole thing clearly stems from the whole dysfunctional relationship our political system has to Supreme Court appointments. I remember from the Alito nomination that it’s somehow very difficult to articulate the view that “the president is someone whose ideas I think are wrong so I’m convinced that his SCOTUS pick also has bad ideas, but those who like the president are bound to see this differently.” Instead, there’s incredible pressure to “unearth” the “truth” about the nominee and how deep down he or she is history’s greatest monster.

Pat Buchanan Mocks Sotomayor for Learning English

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

Amanda Terkel reminds us that normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

Meanwhile, Buchanan also thinks a vote against Sotomayor would be a vote for the white working class. In the real world, of course, despite the attention on “hot button” social issues, the bulk of federal litigation has to do with economic matters. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote of John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

It’s not clear to me why consistently siding with corporate defendants would count as a blow for the interests of the white working class.

The Stuart Taylor Standard

A great catch from Scott Lemieux who takes a look into the archives to see how National Journal legal affairs columnist Stuart Taylor thought we should evaluate Samuel Alito:

Alito’s critics have similarly ignored much evidence that his 15 years of steady, scholarly, precedent-respecting work as a judge tell us more about him than a handful of widely (and misleadingly) publicized memos that he wrote more than 20 years ago.

But what about Sonia Sotomayor?

And some may see Sotomayor’s [innocuous] letter [written as an undergraduate] as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton’s Board of Trustees.

As Scott says “if I understand correctly, memos Alito wrote directly about important constitutional issues while applying for an important government job should be disregarded, but letters that Sotomayor wrote as a student are somehow important despite their utter lack of relevance to any discernible constitutional issue.”

Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote

My friend Julian Sanchez, another not-especially-Hispanic blogger/pundit, has an excellent post on Sonia Sotomayor and the baffling tactics of the conservative movement. I’ll just quote the conclusion:

Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don’t think I’m especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I’m angry. I don’t think Republican pundits really appreciate the kind of damage they’re probably doing, for no reason I can discern given the slim odds of actually blocking the nomination. Which, perhaps, goes to Sotomayor’s point: They really have no idea how they sound to anyone else.

One thing conservatives might want to ask themselves is what would they be saying about Sotomayor if she had the exact same background and record but was a middle class white woman from Riverdale instead of a poor Latina from the projects. Of course, they still wouldn’t like her but they’d find a non-offensive way to express that. They’d say things like “she’ll probably vote with Ginsburg and Breyer whereas I would prefer a justice likely to vote with Scalia and Roberts.” That’s a perfectly good reason to be unhappy with a judicial nominee. Instead, they’re freaking out about her name, about Puerto Rican food, about the idea that she’s bitchy, that she’s benefited from “preferential treatment,” that she must secretly be stupid, that she’s a Klan member, and all kinds of other nonsense that’s only explicable as a hostile reaction to her ethnic background.

Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.

Sotomayor vs Estrada

Karl Rove says conservatives shouldn’t worry about alienating Hispanic voters:

The media has also quickly adopted the story line that Republicans will damage themselves with Hispanics if they oppose Ms. Sotomayor. But what damage did Democrats suffer when they viciously attacked Miguel Estrada’s nomination by President George W. Bush to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second-highest court?

As Jon Chait says, the comparison seems a bit inapt:

And the situations are pretty much identical, except that the GOP has a bad reputation among Hispanics and the Democrats don’t, and the Supreme Court plays an ever-so-slightly larger role in the public imagination than the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is right. Another way of putting the “reputation” point is that Republicans don’t actually need to lose Hispanic support in order to lose ground. The Latino vote share is growing, and the Republican share of the Latino vote is already terrible. It’s hard to see how opposing Sotomayor is going to help with that.

But what Chait’s left out is the tenor of the criticisms made of Estrada. The argument against Estrada, as I recall it, was that he’s very conservative. The argument about Sonia Sotomayor consists of the idea that we should discount her career and her degrees because those are just the results of the kind of “preferential treatment” that poor Puerto Rican girls from the projects get. We’ve also heard that she has a troubling fondness for Puerto Rican food. That it’s unreasonable that she pronounces her name as if it’s a Spanish word. We’ve heard that she’s a soft-hearted woman who wants to set aside the law in favor of empathetic victims, and also heard complaints that she’s failed to set aside the law in order to help out empathetic white people. These kind of criticisms are going to drive Hispanics away from the conservative cause not because conservatives are criticizing a Latina, but because they’re criticizing her in terms that imply a generalized skepticism about the qualifications of all American Hispanics, a loathing of Latin culture, and a monomaniacal obsession with defending the interests of white people. And while not all conservatives have gone in for the full Goldfarb/Krikorian madman treatment, no prominent voices on the right seem interested in checking the tide of borderline bigotry from their camp. It’s a reminder that checking prejudice against non-whites isn’t something conservatives are interested in.

Only Republicans Can Drive Latinos to the Democrats

The Democratic Strategist notes Bill Pascoe’s CQ Politics article “Did Obama Just Use the Sotomayor Nomination To Lock in Florida?” The piece notes that not only is Florida’s Hispanic population large and growing, it’s increasingly composed of Puerto Ricans rather than Cuban-Americans.

That said, I think this line of thought is somewhat misguided. George Bush appointed minorities to a number of high-profile positions, and I don’t ultimately think that having elevated a Hispanic judge to the Supreme Court in place of Samuel Alito would have done much to move votes. Ultimately, I just see little evidence that these kind of appointment decisions have a huge impact on voting.

But what you could see having some impact is less Obama’s decision to appoint Sotomayor than reaction to the conservative reaction to Sotomayor. I think if you look at election results over time, it’s clear that a large number of non-white or non-Anglo Americans seem to have the sense that the Republican Party and the conservative movement don’t have their best interests at heart. And when people see conservatives not just saying “well, I’m a conservative and Sotomayor isn’t, so I’m not happy about the choice” but engaging in bizarre tirades against the “unnatural” pronunciation of her name and the evils of Puerto Rican cuisine while suggesting that the kind of resume that was suitable for Samuel Alito doesn’t cut the mustard for Sonia Sotomayor, well then I think that tends to reenforce the sense that conservatives are very interested in white people’s problems and not so interested in anyone else.

That’s damaging. But that’s not really about Obama picking Sotomayor, it’s about the crazies on the right coming out to play.

Opportunity Knocking for the GOP?

This from Chris Cillizza seems like a big stretch to me:

Given the difficulties inherent in an all out attempt to block Sotomayor, is this nomination already a lost cause for Republicans? Not by a long shot.

If the ultimate goal for Republicans is to defeat Obama in 2012, then the Sotomayor pick presents them with a golden opportunity to cast the president as a traditional liberal — far from the post-partisan figure he was able to present to the American public in the 2008 election.

This seems questionable to me. Joshua Tucker’s call for people to bring his attention to political science research on the impact of Supreme Court confirmation fights on election outcomes hasn’t come up with anything yet. Nate Silver did a quick and dirty analysis suggesting that failed SCOTUS nominees are associated with a small downturn in presidential approval, and there’s no impact of successful confirmations. And of course it’s true that if some as-yet-hidden flaw with Sotomayor emerges that’s for some reason catastrophic enough to sink her confirmation, that would reflect poorly on Obama. But Republicans taking the opportunity to point out that Obama is nominating the kind of judges who Democrats nominate, strikes me as unlikely to dramatically alter anyone’s perception of anything.

By contrast, if conservatives continue to be unable to restrain themselves from loud whining about how society unfairly tilts the odds in favor of Puerto Rican girls growing up in housing projects in the Bronx, they’ll presumably continue their current trajectory of alienating Hispanic voters.

Sotomayor Risk is Primarily on the Downside

Shailagh Murray and Michael D. Shear write that “An all-out assault on Sotomayor by Republicans could alienate both Latino and women voters, deepening the GOP’s problems after consecutive electoral setbacks.” But on the other hand, “sidestepping a court battle could be deflating to the party’s base and hurt efforts to rally conservatives going forward.” It seems to me that it should be easy enough to get the conservative base riled up about something else in the near future. I recall that as recently as last week, the conservative base was furious that Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to torture people.

In terms of Latino voters, meanwhile, the problem facing Sotomayor’s critics is that she’s almost certainly going to be confirmed. And, once confirmed, she’ll be the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court. Soon after that, there’s going to be an inspirational Sonia Sotomayor biography for kids. Probably two, since one will be in Spanish. Responsible parents and teachers of poor Latina students are going to want to point to her life as an example of how if you work hard and stay in school, you can succeed in America despite many disadvantages. Indeed, look at this editorial in today’s edition of El Diaro (English translation here):

Tras la muerte de su marido, Celina Sotomayor veló por sus dos hijos. Les dio techo y proveyó el pan de cada día. Los guió en medio de las vicisitudes y tentaciones de la adolescencia en EE.UU. Como tantas mujeres latinas, es la roca de la familia.

La hija de Celina, Sonia, tuvo que seguir probándose en instituciones dominadas por hombres – en la Universidad de Princeton, en la Facultad de Leyes de Yale, en la Fiscalía de Manhattan, en tribunal de Nueva York. Cada paso requirió gran trabajo y una seguridad inquebrantable.

Para la madre y la hija, hubo pocas latinas que pudieron servir como modelos a seguir y guiarlas. Hoy, gracias a sus luchas y su arduo trabajo, podemos decirle a nuestras hijas: estudien y podrán llegar tan alto y tan lejos como la juez Sonia Sotomayor.

They’re saying that when Sotomayor was growing up under difficult circumstances, there weren’t a lot of examples she could look up to. But today, thanks to the hard work of Sotomayor and her mother, we can say to our daughters that if they study that can go as far as Sonia Sotomayor. Senators who don’t fight and scrape against Sotomayor’s confirmation will take some crap from their base. But Senators who do fight and scrape to derail her nomination are going to become the villains in a story that a lot of kids are going to hear from their parents and teachers.

Anti-Immigration Zealot Tom Tancredo Takes to the Airwaves to Bash Sotomayor

It seems to me that if conservatives want to avoid a Hispanic backlash against their attacks on Sonia Sotomayor they might want to come up with a better spokesman than anti-immigrant zealot Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO):

Indeed, Tancredo might want to ask himself why he was invited on The Ed Show in the first place? Was it because Ed has the best interests of the conservative movement at heart, and was looking to promote the most credible possible conservative voice? Or was it that Tancredo was invited specifically because he’s such a bad spokesman?

Ali Frick takes us back:

Remember, Tancredo is the lawmaker who called Miami a “third world country” because of the number of Latinos there, criticized presidential candidates for “pandering” by participating in a Spanish-language debate, and accused immigrants of “pushing drugs, raping kids, and destroying lives.” He said the issue of immigration is “whether we will survive.

Of course Puerto Ricans aren’t immigrants, but they have many of the same Spanish-speaking, nation-destroying qualities as immigrants from Latin America.

In The Interests of Charity

As I wrote this morning “If you’re a white guy looking to vent about how Puerto Rican women growing up poor in the Bronx get unfair advantages in life, the conservative movement has a lot to offer you.” Just in time, here’s Michael Goldfarb to prove my point “Does anyone dispute that Sotomayor has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life?”

Jason Zengerle comments:

Honestly. Is there anything in Sotomayor’s background–other than the fact that she’s a Latina–that would lead Goldfarb to such a sweeping conclusion? I’m always reluctant to say someone’s a racist, but I’m really struggling to come up with another explanation here.

Personally, I’m of the view that American pundits are too hesitant to call other people’s statements racist, but in the case of Goldfarb I’m willing to lean toward charity. If you look at the man’s body of work in full, there’s tons of evidence that he’s extremely dim-witted and not that much in the way of racially charged rhetoric.

Stuart Taylor Slams Sotomayor

In 2001, Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered a lecture on diversity at the University of California in which she said she “hopes that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Stuart Taylor in National Journal takes a brave stand for whitey:

[U]nless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.

Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

Leaving aside the fact that this is an inane commentary on a strained reading of Sotomayor’s remarks, let’s take some time out for a political observation. I had assumed that the way this was going to go was that conservatives would complain that Sotomayor is too liberal, then progressives would try to imply that conservatives were opposing Sotomayor because she’s too Latina, and then conservatives would whine. Instead, though, a large proportion of conservative really do seem to want to more-or-less explicitly hang their hats on the idea that Sotomayor is too Latina for the Supreme Court and that she must be stopped to protect white male privilege.

Meanwhile, glancing at the National Journal masthead I’m able to note that at least one institution in America has resisted the temptation to hire a bunch of unqualified Hispanics.

Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation

As anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t have what you’d call a strong “Hispanic” identity. Three of my four grandparents are Jews from Eastern Europe. My paternal grandfather, José Yglesias, was a Cuban-American born in Florida. But that puts the family’s actual Hispanic ancestry pretty far back in the past. He grew up in a Spanish-dominant immigrant community, but spoke English fluently. My dad grew up in an English-speaking household and knows some Spanish. I took a semester of Spanish at NYU one summer. And Cuban-American political identity in the United States is heavily oriented around a highly ideological far-right approach to Latin America policy that neither I nor anyone else in my family shares. The Yglesiases emigrated from Cuba before the Revolution, José was initially a Castro supporter, and though he gave that up he and my dad and I all share what you might call anti-anti-Castro views.

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

At any rate, Ann Friedman wrote a great piece on the hypocrisy of this back during the Democratic primary. And I think this item from Neil Sinhababu on constructing political identities is insightful. I think conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

Department of Analogies

Looking over this table, I can certainly see why Sonia Sotomayor might remind you of someone nominated for the Supreme Court by George W. Bush:

And then there’s Ramesh Ponnuru who dubs her Obama’s Miers. Because, I guess, the qualifications Sotomayor holds only count as qualifications if you’re a white dude.

Feckless Bloggers Evaluate Sonia Sotomayor By Reading Her Opinions

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog reminds us why we need real journalists instead of amateur bloggers:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is an obviously serious candidate to serve on the Supreme Court. We have been struck by how the amount of commentary about Judge Sotomayor has ignored the most accessible and valuable source of information: her opinions as an appellate judge. Last year, I directed a project in which a team of Akin Gump summer associates extensively reviewed Judge Sotomayor’s opinions. Amy Howe subsequently revised and expanded their work, with contributions by me.

Here, we summarize what we regard as Judge Sotomayor’s principal opinions in civil cases. Our only goal is to identify and summarize the opinions, not evaluate them.

What follows is some kind of nutjob effort to summarize her opinions in the most important civil litigation she’s been involved with. The whole exercise is absurd. Why would you waste your time on some silly blog when you could read Jeffrey Rosen peddling anonymous gossip in a professional magazine like The New Republic? After all, by not wasting time doing research on people’s work, Rosen’s able to do stuff like presciently observe that John Roberts is a “principled . . . defender[] of judicial restraint” for whom liberals ought to express gratitude.

Sonia Sotomayor and Affirmative Action

Jeffrey Rosen’s anonymous friends’ concerns about Sonia Sotomayor’s intelligence aside, if you want to see a real reason why we’re not likely to get the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice any time soon just read Richard Cohen’s outraged white man’s lament about Judge Sotomayor’s ruling in the Ricci case about an affirmative action program in Connecticut. He’s really pissed about this and so is Stuart Taylor and in a country where most people are white people Sotomayor’s ruling is going to be very unpopular.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that at this New Haven program makes a great deal of sense as public policy. That said, I don’t see any constitutional problem with most affirmative action programs. I think there are clearly cases when there’s a valid interest in promoting the legitimacy of important institutions by diversifying them, and if I were a judge I would be hesitant to say that it should be my role to second-guess elected officials about what they want to do in this regard.

Still, I wouldn’t cry to see these programs shut down and I wouldn’t cry if judges let them continue. But the din around this case ought to indicate what BS all the noises about “judicial activism” are. The grave sin with which Judge Sotomayor is charges is the sin of . . . letting the political process handle an emotionally charged issue rather than putting it in the hands of unelected judges. Suddenly, nobody wants to “leave it to the states”! It’s strange. At any rate, if you ask me the continued salience of these issues is exactly why it would be nice to see more minorities on the bench—or in major newspaper op-ed pages for that matter.

A Dissent on Sotomayor

Reader G.R. writes “how about an anonymous riposte re: Sotomayor? I took a class from her during law school, and I assure you, she’s deadly smart.”

Good to know.

Sonia Sotomayor’s IQ

Sonia Sotomayor seems in many ways like exactly the sort of person Barack Obama would appoint to the Supreme Court. She was born to a working class Puerto Rican family in the South Bronx, and went from Cardinal Spelling High School to Princeton and Yale Law. She worked as an Assistant District Attorney and then went into private practice. George H.W. Bush nominated her for a seat on the Federal District Court, and Bill Clinton elevated her to a Circuit Court. In other words, she’s well-qualified, her work has managed to gain the respect of Republicans, and she’s had a more interesting range of life experiences than your typical Yale Law graduate.

That said, it is the case that the one person I ever seriously discussed this issue with expressed to me the view that Sotomayor doesn’t have the “intellectual firepower” of some other possible nominees and that it would be nice to see someone more impressively brilliant. This isn’t something I’ve written about up until now because:

• I’ve never spoken to Judge Sotomayor.
• I haven’t studied Judge Sotomayor’s opinions.
• You don’t see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at Princeton.
• So it struck me as wrong to run with an anonymous disparaging remark in the absence of actual evidence.

But apparently Jeffrey Rosen doesn’t roll that way, since he has a piece in The New Republic featuring various unnamed people making exactly this argument. I’d say the money quote comes in the final graf of the piece:

I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths.

Really it seems to me that when you see a person who appears to be qualified in all the normal ways, you owe that person a presumption that she’s up to the job. I recall a lot of issues being raised during the Samuel Alito confirmation fight, but at that time I don’t remember anyone raising questions about the intelligence of a Princeton/Yale Law graduate who’d done time on an Appeals Court. Maybe we should make the two of them both take IQ tests or something?