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More on Sotomayor and the New Haven decision from Stuart Taylor.
I admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, especially her deep compassion for underprivileged people. I may well support her confirmation to the Supreme Court if her testimony next month dispels my concern that her decisions may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the “wise Latina woman” superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.
But close study of her most famous case only enhances my concern. That’s the 2008 decision in which a panel composed of Sotomayor and two Appeals Court colleagues upheld New Haven’s race-based denial of promotions to white (and two Hispanic) fire-fighters because too few African-Americans had done well on the qualifying exams.
The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that — contrary to Sotomayor’s position — the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.
Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.
Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor’s onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel’s ruling. …
Jennifer Rubin expands on Taylor’s thoughts.
… What Taylor also makes clear is that the New Haven city officials knuckled into public pressure by “powerful African Americans” to throw out the test. What better example is there of the need for impartial justice to protect a politically unrepresented and unpopular figure ( Frank Ricci) from the howls of the mob that would deny him the equal protection of law? Unfortunately Sotomayor didn’t grasp that. She condoned the mob’s bullying and was prepared to give those that caved to their pressure a legal stamp of approval.
The Senate must ask: is this what we want in a Supreme Court justice?
Mark Steyn says we cannot survive as a society of juveniles.
… When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.
As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America. …
David Warren reexamines the Cairo speech in the light of the speech at the D-Day anniversary.
… When speaking to a western audience, Obama troubles to get his facts straight. When speaking to an eastern audience, he does not. This suggests a president who can see the difference between sugar and sludge; who was quite unlikely to have fooled himself by anything he said in Cairo. Also, a president comfortable with saying different things to different audiences: which all politicians do, though not always to an alarming degree.
Since Saturday, I have received several interesting communications from persons who know something about the Middle East, admitting that Obama was trawling a line, and yet defend him for doing so. Their argument is sufficiently compelling that I’m inclined to think it explains what Obama and advisers thought they were doing.
Let us assume that Obama’s speechwriting team thought very carefully about how his speech would go over in the Muslim world: not only tactically, but strategically. Moreover, Obama himself, from rather more extensive contact with Muslims in his earlier life than he condescended to explicate while running for president, is reasonably well acquainted with sometimes radical differences in outlook between East and West. And while my correspondents casually admit that the Cairo speech was full of what Churchill used to call “terminological inexactitudes,” they argue that these were “necessary” inexactitudes. …
The speech gets another look from Charles Krauthammer. And he will have none of David Warren’s left-handed compliments.
… Even on freedom of religion, Obama could not resist the compulsion to find fault with his own country: “For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation” — disgracefully giving the impression to a foreign audience not versed in our laws that there is active discrimination against Muslims, when the only restriction, applied to all donors regardless of religion, is on funding charities that serve as fronts for terror.
For all of his philosophy, the philosopher-king protests too much. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.
Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.
Camille Paglia covers the speech and a few other topics.
… It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people’s beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.
Obama’s lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like “scholarships,” “internships,” and “online learning” — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism. …
… Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill. The GOP has failed thus far to gain traction only because it is trudging through a severe talent drought. But the moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate — which is why Mitt Romney’s political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave. …
With a few caveats, Samizdata calls our attention to an article in Forbes.
That piece by Joel Kotkin examines the misfortunes of Britain’s Labour Party and suggests the same thing might be in store for the Dems. We can only hope.
The thrashing of Britain’s New Labour Party–which came in a weak third in local and European Parliament elections this week–may seem a minor event compared to Barack Obama’s triumphal overseas tour. Yet in many ways the humiliation of New Labour should send some potential warning shots across the bow of the good ship Obama.
Labour’s defeat, of course, stemmed in part from local conditions, notably a cascading Parliamentary expense scandal that appears most damaging to the party in power. Yet beyond those sordid details lies a more grave tale–of the possible decline of the phenomenon I describe as gentry liberalism.
Gentry liberalism–which reached its height in Britain earlier this decade and is currently peaking in the U.S.–melded traditional left-of-center constituencies, such as organized labor and ethnic minorities, with an expanding class of upper-class professionals from field like media, finance and technology.
Under the telegenic Tony Blair, an Obama before his time, this coalition extended well into the middle-class suburbs. It made for an unbeatable electoral juggernaut.
But today, this broad coalition lies in ruins. An urban expert at the London School of Economics, Tony Travers, suggests that New Labour’s biggest loss is due to the erosion of middle-class suburban support. The party also appears to be shedding significant parts of its historic working-class base, particularly those constituents who aren’t members of the public employee unions. …
Borowitz reports Ahmadinejad won the Stanley Cup.
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