Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Friday, November 05, 2010 8:16:25 PM
From National Review Online's Bench Memos (note highlighted sentence):
Tribe to Obama: Sotomayor Is “Not Nearly As Smart As She Seems To Think She Is”
I’ve obtained a copy of an interesting letter that Harvard law
professor Larry Tribe wrote to his protégé, President Barack Obama, in
the immediate aftermath of Justice Souter’s announcement of his decision
to retire from the Court. I will post a PDF of the letter shortly. [Update: Here’s the letter.] In the meantime, I’ll call attention, in this post and two or three others, to some of its highlights.
The express purpose of Tribe’s letter is to urge that Obama nominate
Elena Kagan to the Souter vacancy. But before making his affirmative
case for Kagan, Tribe argues strongly against the alternative of
nominating Sonia Sotomayor:
Bluntly put, she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is,
and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her
liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the
Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the Court on issues like those
involved in the voting rights case argued last week and the Title VII
case of the New Haven firefighters argued earlier, issues on which
Kennedy will probably vote with Roberts despite Souter’s influence but
on which I don’t regard Kennedy as a lost cause for the decade or so
that he is likely to remain on the Court.
Tribe then discusses possible candidates for a future Stevens vacancy
and pointedly doesn’t mention Sotomayor even for that vacancy.
Readers of this clever, perceptive (if sporadically updated) website have known this for a long time now. Justice Somediocre is an intellectual nullity, a poster child for repealing all affirmative action laws, and was appointed to the Supreme Court (in my opinion) to discredit that great American institution. Of course, it doesn't really deserve the credit that it retained before this embarrassing choice, but this sure didn't help. It's a pity no-one in the major media told us this before her confirmation.
And don't get me started on Elena Kagan...