Sotomayor Hearings: Much too much ado about NOTHING.

Does anyone truly believe that the Supreme Court Justices who denied freedom to the plaintiff in Plessey v. Ferguson, stating that the Black man had no rights regarding which the White man need be concerned, made the decision free of the inherent prejudices of personal ethnicity and upbringing? A brief look at the decisions of current Supreme Court Justice Scalia will show virtually NO decisions in which the rights of ethnic minorities have prevailed over Whites, despite his southern European heritage once viewed as a negative by the same power elite he currently bows down to. Roberts and Alito were chosen precisely because they would rely upon their White heritage to protect the interest of the WASP establishment from any significant attempt to protect or expand the rights of ethnic minorities [swiftly becoming majority]. Clearly the Right has been burned in the past,Rehnquist turned out not to be as racist as his right wing champions had hoped and O'Connor was virtually branded as a traitor. So they are very prickly about any attempt to rebalance the Court by appointment of a non-White female who is exceptionally bright and qualified.

So all this claptrap about Sotomayor persists in nonsense and hypocrisy. Sotomayor wisely acknowledged that her background gives her a perspective and backdrop against which she could evaluate issues that might come before her, and perhaps view them with greater sensitivity than someone from a more limited experiential background. There are, unfortunately, still people in the echelons of power who have never had a genuine encounter with an everyday person of color, a person in poverty or someone disenfranchised. These "select few" are the ones who Sessions and others of his stripe would prefer to see on the Supreme Court Bench. How sad. The very essence of the values upon which the country and the concept of a Supreme Court was supposedly founded lies in the ability to recognize, understand and empathize with people of any walk of life, ethnicity and socio-economic class.

The fallacy of slavish adherence to "law" or precedent is that many of those precedents were created by Courts and justices who lacked comprehension and empathy. This is where precedent can depart from "law." Prior decisions, stare decisis should not be cast aside lightly, but sometimes it is just plain WRONG, as in the example of Plessey v Ferguson. A wiser, more mature and empathic reading and interpretation of the "law" later obliged the Supreme Court to cast that decision aside. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." It is these small minds that are attempting to conjure fears built upon ignorance of the public [and perhaps their own] about the legal process and the selection of Judge Sotomayor.

By any objective measure, Judge Sotomayor is more qualified by intellect, maturity and experience, to be a Supreme Court Justice than half the men with who she will share the responsibilities of the Court. It is fondly to be wished that she will share that wisdom borne of her experiences [the quote being used to attack her] with those empathically stunted jurists with whom she will work. If she does, we can indeed hope for better and wiser decisions from the Court that reflect the rights, needs and interests of all Americans instead of decisions that merely use twists of sophistry and talismanic references to reliance upon the "law" to preserve and protect the current system that unjustly favors a small group of socio-economic elitists.