Thumbs Down to Judge Sotomayor

The importance of appointing a person to the Supreme Court cannot be overstated - it's an unelected life time appointment to a government office that can overturn laws enacted by Congress, policies implemented by the President, and of more import, at least in my mind, "interprets" the constitution. Further, whether you like it or not, judges in general and Supreme Court Justices in particular make law. Therefore, the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice is exceptionally important and should rise above partisan politics. Alas it does not.

Now to Judge Sotomayor. She is undoubtedly further left than I am on many issues, but a person's political beliefs in-and-of-themselves should not be a disqualifying factor. I also had some concerns about her "wise Latina" statements that at best were intemperate and her role in deciding Ricci, but wanted to hear her reasoning before deciding whether I would support her appointment. Let's be honest, we all make mistakes and we all say things that don't convey the message we intended. However, her testimony before congress yesterday is deeply troubling for the simple reason that she was either telling an untruth or she has no idea of what judges do. Given that she has been a judge for 17 years the latter is simply not possible, and therefore, the only logical conclusion is that Judge Sotomayor is lying in order to be appointed to the Supreme Court. I think Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown University, said it best in an online debate yesterday:

I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor's testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts?...many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith...

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves

The only part of Professor Seidman's analysis I disagree with is that Judge Sotomayor should be excused for telling an untruth, or in his words, "perjuring herself" in order to be appointed to the Supreme Court. I think that is what is fundamentally wrong with our government today - that the "elites" will lie in order to get what they want.

So I believe the question now becomes - "do we want to entrust the interpretation of our constitution to a person who is either intellectually or morally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court?" The answer to me is simple - No.