Yesterday, we evaluated Lindsey Graham's claim about PRLDEF and abortion; we learned Tom Coburn watches a lot of I Love Lucy; and the hearings themselves became a war of attrition. Replay my tweets from the entire hearing here.
Daphne Eviatar points out that Al Franken asked some good questions, and that the nominee may have tipped her hand on the Voting Rights Act. Richard Prince probes the difference between black, Latino, and white reactions to the hearings.
I'm guessing like half the country has memorized Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" quote through sheer media saturation. Jim Naureckas does a little Nexising and finds out that, while 69 of the AP's dispatches feature Jeff Sessions accusing Sotomayor of being a racist, a grand total of two mention that his 1986 nomination to be a federal judge was derailed because of his racist behavior as a U.S. Attorney. You'd think that would be considered a relevant part of the richness of his experience.
Today we begin with the witness panels, but Kate Klonick has noticed something rather strange -- there is a large number of non-lawyers on the witness list.
At Roberts’s hearing four years ago, just 6 out of the 33 witnesses were non-lawyers, and at Alito’s hearing, only one witness was neither a lawyer or a congressperson. Not only was Alito’s hearing heavy on legal credentials, it had high-powered ones: 7 past and present judges and a former solicitor general testified at Alito’s hearing.As Klonick points out, the composition of the witness list reveals the nature of the GOP's objections regarding Sotomayor -- or at least the fact that they don't have much to do with the law or her record. But after three days of parsing and distorting Sotomayor's wise Latina quote, and the presence of the Ricci firefighters on the witness list -- I think we can make a few educated guesses about what's driving the GOP's opposition.In comparison, there are no past or present judges, solicitors general or attorneys general on Sotomayor’s witness list – and a whopping 10 witnesses who don’t have a law degree at all.
Of course the Democrats bear some blame as well--what is a pitcher doing on the witness list again?
-- A. Serwer
