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Obama calls criticism of Sotomayor ‘nonsense’
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Judge ‘understands ... day-to-day lives’
The controversy over Sotomayor’s comments is likely to come up next week, when she is scheduled to meet with Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada and Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Sessions and other Republican senators have said Sotomayor would get a fair hearing and was almost certain to be confirmed. But other conservative figures have seized on Sotomayor’s 2001 speech as proof of her bias against whites and men. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called her a “racist” in an online posting.
Obama sharply defended Sotomayor, saying that in her confirmation hearings “all this nonsense that is being spewed out will be revealed for what it is.”
In the same speech, Sotomayor pointed out “that it was nine white males who passed down Brown versus Board of Education, which is partly responsible for me sitting here,” Obama said, in reference to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that made school segregation illegal.
“So that’s hardly the kind of statement that would indicate that she subscribes to identity politics,” he said.
“Part of the job of a justice on the Supreme Court, or any judge, is to be able to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to be able to understand the nature of the case and how it has an impact on people’s ordinary day-to-day lives,” Obama said, adding that Sotomayor would be able to understand the concerns of both “the farmer in Iowa” and “a corporate CEO.”
“That breadth of experience, that knowledge of how the world works, is part of what we want for a justice who’s going to be effective,” he said.
Gibbs laments ‘poor’ choice of words
Still, the president implicitly agreed with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who called Sotomayor’s choice of words in her 2001 speech “poor.”
Gibbs told reporters that Sotomayor was “simply making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging, that your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts in certain cases, that your experiences affect your understanding.”
More than one line in the 2001 speech has helped drive the debate over Sotomayor’s judgment.
She also said, for example: “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.”
“My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas in which I am unfamiliar,” she said. “I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”
In nominating Sotomayor, Obama said he wanted a judge who would “approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice.” But he also called her life experience essential, saying she had an understanding of “how ordinary people live.”
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