The Supreme Court will soon have its first Puerto Rican justice, Sonia Sotomayor. Due to the newly minted 60-vote Democrat super majority in the Senate, even the ultimate weapon of a minority party, the filibuster, would not be effective in derailing President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.
Given these facts and the historical significance of a Hispanic woman’s ascension to the highest court in the land, one might wonder why Republicans would risk what little political capital they have left with the Hispanic community by opposing her confirmation.
The answer is that Republicans are not the practitioners of identity politics. That title belongs to those who sit on the left, including Sotomayor.
Recently, junior Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said he will be opposing Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation.
This bold stance has led many to suggest his opposition to Sotomayor will hurt him when it comes to the nation’s fastest growing voter block. However, Cornyn’s principled stance against the confirmation of a judge who has a dubious record at best should not affect him dramatically.
Texas Hispanics’ approval rating of Cornyn is below 40 percent. Despite this statistic, he still managed to defeat Rick Noriega, a Hispanic, by winning 55 percent of the vote in November 2008.
This is not to say that Cornyn’s opposition to Sotomayor won’t hurt him slightly but his numbers are already so low that it should not make a calamitous difference in the next election.
Many pundits are claiming that by opposing Sotomayor, the GOP is committing political ‘hara-kiri’ in regards to the Hispanic vote. One must not forget the 2003 railroading of Honduran-born, and George W. Bush-nominated Miguel Estrada.
It was during this debacle that Democrats, such as Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, specifically blocked Estrada’s bid for an appointment to the D.C. Court of Appeals because he was Hispanic.
Durbin lamented in a memo that because ‘he was a Latino,’ Estrada was ‘especially dangerous,’ as he may eventually be appointed to the Supreme Court.
If these statements were written by a Republican, they would have been called what they were – racist. Plus, they would have sunk Durbin’s popularity among Hispanics.
However, as the only party with a former Ku Klux Klan member in its leadership, the Democratic party used its get-out-of-racist-claims free card. Durbin garnered a sizeable majority of the Hispanic vote and crushed his most recent Republican opponent.
Certain things are inevitable. Wednesday, the sun will rise and the sea will meet the shore. Sotomayor will be our first Puerto Rican Supreme Court Justice.
The Democrats will use any opposition to her confirmation as an example of simple Republican racism, while playing their own race-based political game behind closed doors in rooms filled with white faces. Somewhere, George Wallace is smiling.
Timothy Mathis is a history junior and may be reached at [email protected]
