Supremely Civil Ads ... So Far

The Judicial Confirmation Network's Internet ad highlights the same Sotomayor statements that have been Topic A for conservatives over the last week. The narrator reads Sotomayor's remarks from a 2001 lecture she gave at Berkeley's Boalt School of Law about how her background affects her work.

The quotes in the JCN ad are certainly accurate. She was speaking of the disproportionately low representation of Latinos and women in the judiciary – noting that these groups make up only 10 out of 147 active circuit court judges and 30 out of 587 active district court judges. And she expressed thoughts such as this: "I ... believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group."

But she also made the remark about hoping "that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience" would usually reach a better decision than a white man. The Obama administration has indicated that she will back down from that statement, which isn't playing well.

Obama, May 29: I'm sure she would have restated it, but if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what's clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through.

And, as Fox's Wallace pointed out, Justice Samuel Alito said something not dissimilar during his confirmation hearing in 2006 after being nominated by President Bush:

Alito, Jan. 11, 2006: 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.

The ad concludes with a clip of Sotomayor's statement that the "Court of Appeals is where policy is made," which is, for conservatives, a red flag indicating an "activist" judge of the kind they often critique. We provided some context for her remark in a recent post on the FactCheck Wire.

While the air wars have been relatively calm, we've answered some questions about things being said about Sotomayor by figures like Rush Limbaugh and gun rights advocates. As we wrote in one Ask FactCheck item, it's not true that 80 percent of the judge's appellate rulings have been overturned by the Supreme Court. First, only five of them have been reviewed by the Court at all, and second, of those, three were reversed. In another item, we confirmed that Sotomayor has ruled that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to states and localities, thus those non-federal jurisdictions can regulate and ban weapons.

Republished with permission from factcheck.org .

Sources
Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Fox News Network, 31 May 2009.
Moore, Kristina. "Timing Sotomayor's Senate Confirmation," Scotusblog.com, 26 May 2009.
Tapper, Jake and Sunlen Miller. "POTUS Interrupts Press Briefing to Announce Souter's Retirement, Announce Qualifications for Next Supreme," Political Punch, abcnews.com. 1 May 2009.
Garrett, Major. "Obama Pushes for 'Empathetic' Supreme Court Justices," foxnews.com. 1 May 2009.
Tumulty, Karen. "Why God Invented C-Span," Swampland, time.com. 29 May 2009.
Sotomayor, Sonia. Lecture: "A Latina Judge's Voice," The New York Times. 15 May 2009.

© 2009