Jack & Jill Politics

...I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

...conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

Just a few days ago, the Republican Party was struggling to disassociate themselves from the Party of No label, and now, with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United State, the new battle cry is, "We are not racists":

Lionel Sosa, a Texas-based Republican ad maker who designed Latino outreach for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, said that opposing Sotomayor "would be one more nail in the Republicans' image coffin in terms of Latino voters."

"When you're anti the first Latina on the Supreme Court, you're anti-my-family. . . . I would take it that these people are anti-Latino," Sosa added. "The worst thing the Republicans can do is oppose her."

The Senate's Republican leadership, aware of the potential pitfalls, began conferring Tuesday with several Latino strategists, seeking their assessment of conservative opposition.

The GOP's dilemma on Sotomayor is the latest example of the party's internal struggle over how to reinvent itself at a time that its voter base is increasingly dominated by Southern, conservative white men.

Which leads us to a classic case of, rock, meet hard place, because the very people given the "leaders of the party" label -- the Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich wing of the party -- aren't struggling at all. They've come out against Sotomayor in full attack mode, calling her, among other things, a "reverse racist," a "radical," and a "disaster." And it probably doesn't help when the media outreach person for the Republican National Committee is retweeting claims of racism against Sotomayor

Via Glenn Greenwald (and one of his readers) comes a moment from Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings that will either silence Sonia Sotomayor’s conservative critics or expose their hypocrisy for what it is.

In an exchange with Sen. Tom Coburn, who had asked Alito to discuss how his personal experiences shows that "he cared for the little guy," Alito said that his family’s experience as immigrants influenced his outlook on immigration cases.

And that’s why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position…

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.