Committee for Justice Blog

http://www.committeeforjustice.org/cfjnew/blog/

July 16, 2009

The NRA Comes Out Against Sotomayor

The National Rifle Association has issued a statement officially declaring its opposition to Judge Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The statement can be read here.

This announcement is encouraging because of its potential to impact the votes of Democratic senators from red and swing states, who are especially wary of upsetting gun rights advocates in fear of the group's ability to thwart their hopes for reelection.

July 15, 2009

Poll: Plurality Oppose Confirming Sotomayor

A new Rasmussen poll shows that a plurality oppose the confirmation of Sotomayor: 43% are opposed to her confirmation while just 37% are in favor. It will be interesting to see whether opposition continues to grow as Sotomayor's poor performance continues on day 3.

Ed Morrissey rounds-up reviews of Sotomayor's performance so far and they aren't good, which provides anecdotal support for Rasmussen's polling.

Inherent Physiological Differences

Sotomayor’s explanation, in response to Sen. Cornyn, of her statement that “inherent physiological or cultural differences” may result in gender and ethnic/racial differences in judging has to be her worst performance this week. Most of her response completely evaded Cornyn’s question, and the remainder of her answer did nothing to assuage concern that she believes there are inherent physiological differences and “differences in logic and reasoning” in how women and minorities think.

Quote of the Day

It comes from liberal Georgetown law professor Michael Seidman.

"Speaking only for myself (I guess that's obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor's testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified."

Update: GOP staffers question the truthfulness of Sotomayor's testimony.

"After a night of studying Sotomayor's testimony, Republicans will have more questions about what they view as her misrepresentation of her record. GOP senators know that Democrats are committed to confirming Sotomayor, and, with a 12-to-7 advantage in the committee and 60 votes in the full Senate, they don't need any Republican support to get it done. But they are troubled by her answers, by her attempts to deny the clear meaning of her words from the past. And that could result in growing, rather than diminishing, Republican opposition. 'We heard a lot of things that were not factually buttoned down,' the senior GOP aide said. 'If that's because she and the White House think she has the votes and doesn't have to answer, then some Republicans are going to be troubled by that.'"

July 14, 2009

CFJ Ads Debut

Sen. Graham’s questioning about Sotomayor’s leadership role in the radical positions taken by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund serves as the perfect introduction for CFJ’s brand new TV ad, which discusses that role. CFJ’s new print ads address Sotomayor’s views on race and the Second Amendment. Our radio ads will be posted shortly. The ads will be aimed at the constituents of red and purple state Democrats.

TV ad:
http://web.committeeforjustice.org

Print ads:
http://web.committeeforjustice.org/Home/Page/Ads

PRLDEF: Sotomayor vs. the Facts

Sotomayor portrays herself as barely aware of the activities of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund during the 12 years that she served on its board. So let’s review her description and the New York Times’s description of her time on the board:

“[Sotomayor] played an active role as the defense fund staked out aggressive stances on issues like police brutality, the death penalty and voting rights. The board monitored all litigation undertaken by the fund’s lawyers, and a number of those lawyers said Ms. Sotomayor was an involved and ardent supporter of their various legal efforts during her time with the group.” – NY Times, May 28, 2009

“I served … in the following capacities: Member and Vice President, Board of Directors; Chairperson, Litigation and Education Committees for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.” – Sotomayor’s Senate questionnaire

Abortion and Firearms as Civil Rights Issues

In responding to Sen. Graham, Sotomayor justifies PRLDEF taking a position on abortion – in fact, the radical position of equating the denial of federal funding for abortion with slavery – based on the argument that abortion is a civil rights issue. Someone should ask her if she agrees with today’s article by Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski explaining why Second Amendment rights are an important civil right, especially for minorities.

CFJ on Twitter

Thanks to my colleagues Christina Pesavento and Dylan Marck for summarizing my live blogging on Twitter, while adding their own insightful commentary.

http://twitter.com/comforjustice

Sotomayor on “Inherent Physiological” Differences of Minority Judges

Good cross examination by Sen. Kyl on Sotomayor’s theory of ethnicity-based judging. Maybe I missed something, but why haven’t any senators asked Sotomayor about the most shocking statements in her Berkeley speech, specifically:

“Whatever the reasons why [judges of color] may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning …” (emphasis added)

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” (emphasis added)

Even Senator Feingold

Wow, even Sen. Feingold is expressing concern about Sotomayor’s ruling that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to Wisconsin and other states. When I said that Second Amendment concerns among red and purple states Democrats are the key to credibly challenging Sotomayor’s confirmation, it’s not Sen. Feingold I had in mind.

Note to Self

Note to self from Sonia Sotomayor: At every possible opportunity, repeat the line about policy being the job of the other branches. I don’t really believe it – see Duke University and my other speeches – but MSNBC will eat it up.

Where’s Her Empathy?

Sen. Grassley or the next Republican to question Sotomayor should draw a comparison between her property rights decision in Didden and the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter ruling, upholding a statute of limitations defense to Lilly Ledbetter’s pay discrimination claim. Democrats have repeatedly called the Ledbetter decision an outrage because of its narrow reading of the statute of limitations. Doesn’t the same logic apply to Sotomayor’s narrow use of the statute of limitations to throw out Mr. Didden’s claim that extortion is not what the Founders had in mind when they included “for public use” in the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause?

DiFi Dead Wrong

Sen. Feinstein just said that the Supreme Court has struck down dozens of federal statutes as beyond the reach of the Commerce Clause. I can only think of two, the Gun Free School Zones Act and the civil remedy provision of the Violence Against Women Act.

I got a kick out of Feinstein’s remark that the Court shouldn’t put any teeth in the limits on the scope of the Commerce Clause because it gets in the way of Congress doing its job of legislating. Call me naive but I thought Congress’s job was to legislate only within the bounds of the Constitution.

Also, it’s good to hear that Feinstein is bothered by all the calls her office is getting expressing concern that Sotomayor is a judicial activist. Sounds like us Sotomayor critics are having an impact.

Leahy: Why We Blocked Estrada

Sen. Leahy just admitted that Miguel Estrada, the man who might have been the High Court’s first Hispanic justice, was obstructed by Senate Democrats for two years to punish the Bush Administration for not releasing documents, despite the fact that, in Leahy’s words, the lack of release was “no fault of [Estrada’s].”

More on Sotomayor’s 2nd Amendment Theories

Sotomayor just explained in a very matter of fact manner that, of course, nunchucks can be banned under a rational basis test because they “can hurt somebody.” She then said her holding in Maloney was a “very narrow ruling.” She seems unaware that the “can hurt somebody” standard makes Maloney a very broad ruling, because except for toy guns, all firearms can hurt somebody.

Second Amendment

Re Sen. Hatch’s 2nd Amendment questions, Sotomayor’s 2009 Maloney opinion strongly implies that the rational basis test she would apply to state regulation of firearms is whether they are “designed primarily as a weapon.” In other words, Hatch is correct that, under Sotomayor’s reasoning, all state gun restrictions are lawful.

Burying Ricci

Another great point by Sessions: Sotomayor explains her troubling and cursory opinion in Ricci, the New Haven firefighters case, by saying it was the Supreme Court’s job to decide the issue at hand. But then why did she and her colleagues on the 2nd Circuit panel do everything they could to bury the opinion and insulate it from review?

Sotomayor’s Full Flowering

Sen. Sessions just noted that Judge Sotomayor’s race and ethnicity-based theory of judging will reach “full flower” on the Supreme Court. That’s an important point. Most of her controversial statements occurred in the dozen or so years that Sotomayor was being discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee and thus, assumedly, was on her best behavior. Imagine what we’ll see when she’s no longer auditioning for a promotion.

I Didn’t Mean “Policy” When I Said “Policy”

Sotomayor just told Sen. Sessions that she meant “precedent” rather than “policy” when she told a Duke University crowd that the “the Court of appeals is where policy is made.” If so, why in her next sentence at Duke did she say “I know this is on tape and I should never say that”? Sotomayor’s strategy – or to be fair, the White House’s strategy – is to deny the plain meaning of all the controversial things she has said, no matter how implausible her explanation.

Not from the Heart

Much of the exchange between Sotomayor and Leahy, including discussion of the Second Amendment, sounds so wooden and awkward that I almost feel sorry for them. I don’t know if they practiced too much or too little, but it sure doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the heart – either Sotomayor’s or Leahy’s.

Pelosi Censors Republicans

by Rep. John Carter

Monday night Democrats voted to shut down the U.S. House Representatives rather than allow a handful of Republican Congressmen to speak on the floor. What could have been so offensive or frightening about our discourse that Speaker Pelosi felt she had to protect her party by gagging free speech in the House?

In fact, we had planned to speak on the lack of transparency of the House since Democrats took control. We had planned to criticize Speaker Pelosi for repeatedly denying Members, the media, and the public to right to read legislation before it was voted on. We were set to discuss House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s statement last week that if his Members were required to read the Democrats’ healthcare reform package before it was voted on, it would fail.

So the Speaker obviously feels that if the public is truly aware of her party’s agenda, they will reject it. She is now making sure the public is kept in the dark by trampling the centuries-old democratic traditions of the House.

What are those traditions? Every day that the House is in session, following the final vote of the day, representatives are allowed the privilege of free speech on the House floor in what is known as “Special Orders.” They may speak for one minute, five minutes, or one hour segments, and must request their time in advance. Time is allocated equally to both parties on a first-come basis.

Since the advent of live C-SPAN coverage of the House, this has provided a national televised outlet for both Republicans and Democrats to speak to the nation on topics they feel were not adequately addressed during regular order in the House, during which the Democrat majority has the parliamentary ability to limit debate and speeches.

Special Orders therefore frequently serves as a political safety valve if the party in the majority becomes too dictatorial during debate, using their majority status to truly oppress the minority’s ability to debate and offer amendments.

That is now the case in the House, with the Democrat majority under Pelosi repeatedly rejecting House rules to ram a far-left agenda through before the public has time to learn what is actually in the bills.

This is what we were committed to bring to public light.

House rules require a bill be publicly posted for three days before it can be voted on. That basic rule was written by none other than Thomas Jefferson as part of the original rules package of the House, as it is essential to the survival of representative democracy.

The House can waive that rule if it chooses on specific occasions. The Republican-controlled House chose to waive it when considering the Patriot Act in 2001 following the terror attacks of 9-11. They thought there was enough of a national defense emergency to just bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

But Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats have chosen to ignore the rule on every major issue taken up by the House this year, including:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - The Obama Stimulus: This one just had to pass that very day because time was a-wastin’ in getting those new jobs coming. We couldn’t wait for Members to read it. But then the President waited four days to sign it into law while he spent the weekend in Chicago, and months later none of the new jobs have come into existence.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization (SCHIP): Speaker Pelosi couldn’t wait on this one either, although the deadline for reauthorization was still two months away.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: Lilly was peddled as covering decades-old wage discrimination cases, but after waiting 20 years, Congress couldn’t wait one more day to let Members actually read the thing. The bill is still stuck in the Senate Committee

The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009: No excuses at all on this one. They just didn’t want the details known.

The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009: This one has been languishing since last October, but we suddenly had to pass it that day.

The AIG Bonus Tax Act: This had to get through right then, don’t mind the details, we just had to go after those bonuses. Only when we read what passed after the fact, the bill contained waivers for all of the same executives the bill was supposed to reign in, many with curiously close ties to Treasury Secretary and tax cheat Tim Geithner.

The Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009: No rush whatever on this one time-wise, the Democrats just didn’t want people talking about the hundreds of billions given to foreign banks that should have gone to our troops.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act/National Cap-and-Trade Energy Tax:
No excuse was offered on this one, the Speaker just didn’t want anybody reading Henry Waxman’s 300 page amendment he sneaked in overnight before we were forced to vote. Three weeks later, the Senate shows no intention of taking up the bill before the opening day of dove season, if then.

There’s a reason all these bills are listed. The list constitutes every major policy bill undertaken by Congress this year. House Democrats are not just waiving the three-day rule -- they have destroyed it, and are intentionally pushing their agenda to the floor with blindfolds on the media and the public.

This constitutes an astonishing and chilling acceleration of the assault on representative democracy that began in earnest this January.

Representative democracy works when a U.S. Representative listens to the input of their constituents, and votes the way the majority of their district would vote. Only a Representative can’t listen if no one has ever seen the bill, or had time to provide input. They have to vote blind, which for too many, is voting the way their leadership tells them.

This is what Republican House Members were going to the floor to say Monday night. We were set to decry the loss of openness in the House.

Instead, we were met with a slammed door by Democrats, who are now committed to burying truth along with democracy.

The Democrats are the majority -- for now. They chose to silence debate on the floor by gagging House Republican Members from using their historical right to speak after the close of the day. But they cannot stop us from speaking outside the halls of Congress and letting the American public know the truth about their ongoing attack against the very foundations of a free Republic.

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Mr. Carter, a Republican, represents the 31st District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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