"The Senate confirmed
Sonia Sotomayor Thursday as the
first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court.
The vote was 68-31 for Sotomayor,
President Barack Obama’s first high court nominee.
She becomes the 111th justice
and just the third woman to serve. Democrats praised
the 55-year-old
Sotomayor as a mainstream
moderate. But most Republicans voted against her...
NATURALLY!!!
saying she’d bring personal bias
and a liberal agenda to the bench. Senators
took the rare step
of assembling at their desks on the Senate
floor for the historic occasion,
rising from their seats to
cast their votes. She replaces
retiring Justice David Souter,
a liberal named by a Republican president,
and she is not expected to alter the court’s ideological split.
Still,
Republicans and Democrats were deeply at odds
over confirming
Sotomayor,and the battle over
her nomination highlighted profound
philosophical
disagreements that will shape
future battles over the court’s makeup as
Obama looks
to another likely vacancy—perhaps
more than one_
while he’s in the White House.
The GOP decried Obama’s call for
“empathy”
in a justice, painting Sotomayor
as the embodiment of an inappropriate
standard that would let a judge bring
her personal whims
and prejudices to the bench.
Her writings and speeches “reflect
a belief not just that
impartiality is not possible,
but that it’s not even worth the effort,”
said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,
the minority leader.
“In Judge Sotomayor’court, groups
that didn’t make the cut of preferred groups
often found that they
ended up on the short end of the empathy standard.”"
