>Is Sotomayor The Reverse of David Souter?

>How do presidents and Senators get it “right?”

When President George W. H. Bush named David Souter an associate Supreme Court judge, little did he know that he would morph into a liberal jurist especially since 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and in Bush v. Casey, 2000. He began to vote with liberal judges Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stevens whom he considered to be the “smartest” justice.

Paradoxically, it was Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan, who named Stevens to the highest bench in the land.

If baseball general managers and field managers find it difficult to draft the players that will win batting crowns and take their teams to the World Series, it is infinitesimally ^{harder to look at candidates for the Supreme Court and predict how they will vote on hundreds of different issues that will come before the court.}

I offer the example of David Hackett Suter. President George W.H. Bush was advised by John Sununu and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman that this man was conservative — and he was in many ways — and would be a great nominee to the Supreme Court.

Liberal Senators Edward Kennedy, John Carey, and others strongly opposed that appointment. Yet as it turned out, Souter retires having been with the majority of most liberal voting done in that court the past 19 years.

Making matters even more difficult to judge by those pinhead experts in Washington, Souter spoke of his admiration for the conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan II of the Warren court, as well as for liberal Justice William Brennan of the same court, during his confirmation hearings.

^{If George Bush was fooled, so were many other Republicans including his more conservative and moderate supporters. In that group include President Reagan who learned that a judge’s leanings may have nothing to do with how he subsequently turns out when confronted with controversial issues presented to the highest court in the land.}

Souter had been mentioned by the New York Times as one of Reagan’s four top nominees for the Supreme Court slot that eventually went to Anthony Kennedy, who turned out liberal, not conservative as Reagan wanted. Warren Rudman had recommend both Kennedy and Souter to Reagan’s chief of staff Howard Baker for both a federal judgeship and the Supreme Court.

One of the lessons for George Bush should have been: Never listen to Warren Rudman, he’s a liberal not a conservative. Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had “suspected all along” that Souter would not “overturn activist liberal precedents.” ^{Sununu later said: “In spite of it all, he’s a good friend. But I’ve always known that he was more liberal than he liked the world to think he was.}“

The question now that Republicans have said they will not filibuster in the Senate over Sotomayor’s nomination is how sure is Barak Obama that his nominee will vote liberally?

Judging by our history with Souter, the answer is that when it comes down to individual issues, no matter what they said in the hearings, these judges will vote their hearts and sometimes be liberal and sometimes be conservative. In other words, Obama won’t know until the issues come before the court.

Is all this ballyhoo that took up so much television prime time just a sham? Is it just a forum for Senators to show how much they know about the law, for example, Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Ut), or to prove one’s incompetence about the law, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D- CA) and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)?

When you come down to it, is it just a crap shoot, anyway? The answers are yes!

>Getting America Right By Rulling Against Sotomayor

>By Don White
I blogged about the Sotomayor reversal in my blog, “Madoff Gets 150 Years, Sotomayor Overturned,”Political Disconnect this morning. Please click over to that story when you finish this one.

If you believe as I do, that qualification should be the only criteria for promoting anyone, then you should like what the Supreme Court did today. They overturned a Sotomayor ruling in Appeals Court that would have made a mockery out of a city’s promotion policies. Had the Supreme Court not have overturned this Latina from Porto Rico today, the very person who would be a Supreme Court jurist, people in similar positions in municipality jobs across the nation could not count on competence as the sole criteria for promotion.

Democrats, those far left people who lack logic and reason, wanted the fiction which we should abolish called Affirmative Action to rule the day. It did not, and maybe it has gone a long way toward forever burying the notion that black men should be given job preferences simply because they’re black.

If I were Jewish or Mormon, I would not be given rights others don’t have, that is to get a job I’m not qualified for just because there is a long history in America and in the world of religious discrimination against these two religions. Affirmative Action has run its course. When were civil rights given to Blacks. It started following the Civil War when they were freeded in about 1865, almost 150 years ago. The Civil Rights law of the sixties put another nail into the coffin of discrimination, and that was over 40 years ago.

Even blacks who have accomplished things in this country look at Affirmative Action as a millstone placed on the shoulders of black people. It doesn’t help black people, it gives them a crutch. Judge Sotomayor was not qualified to get into an Ivy League university because of her IQ, SAT scores, and high school performance. But due to Affirmative Action, she was preferred above better qualified students of other races to receive a superior education.

That kind of reverse discrimination has got to stop! And it appears the Supreme Court has driven a small nail into that coffin, too.

Whether it will end there is uncertain, given the fact President Obama has a chance during the next while to put a majority of liberals on the court, and that could change everything. If he can’t ruin America one way, he will do it another way.