At the end of a post on Judge Sonia Sotomayor the other day I wondered if Democrats had forgotten the questiion that was on all of their lips when Clarence Thomas was nominated fro the Supreme Court, to wit "Is this the best qualified pick President George H. W. Bush could have made?"
Well, Richard Cohen, a liberal writer at the Washington Post, asks virtually that same question and comes up with an interesting answer. She's qualified, but hardly the best pick Obama could have made:
She is fully qualified. She is smart and learned and experienced and, in case you have not heard, a Hispanic, female nominee, of whom there have not been any since the dawn of our fair republic. But she has no cause, unless it is not to make a mistake, and has no passion, unless it is not to show any, and lacks intellectual brilliance, unless it is disguised under a veil of soporific competence until she takes her seat on the court. We shall see.
In the meantime, Sotomayor will do, and will do very nicely, as a personification of what ails the American left. She is, as everyone has pointed out, in the mainstream of American liberalism, a stream both intellectually shallow and preoccupied with the past.
Cohen laments that President Obama declined to find a liberal to equal in quality of mind Antonin Scalia or several of the other conservatives on the Court:
Where in all of Sotomayor's opinions, speeches and now testimony is there anything approaching Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson, in which, alone, he not only found fault with the law creating special prosecutors but warned about how it would someday be abused? "Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing," he wrote. "But this wolf comes as a wolf."
My admiration for Scalia is constrained by the fact that I frequently believe him to be wrong. But his thinking is often fresh, his writing is often bracing; and, more to my point, he has no counterpart on the left. His liberal and moderate brethren wallow in bromides; they can sometimes outvote him, but they cannot outthink him.
This is the sad state of both liberalism and American politics. First-class legal brains are not even nominated lest some senator break into hives at the prospect of encountering a genuinely new idea.
In other words, in his attempt to play ethnic and gender politics President Obama has squandered an opportunity to appoint an exceptional jurist. Of course, it may simply be that there are no exceptional jurists to be found on the left, I don't know, but it says something about Obama's own frame of mind that intellectual excellence is to him secondary to political appeasement.
Parenthetically, I was amazed by a paragraph in Cohen's column in which he takes Sotomayor to task for her reluctance to condemn capital punishment. The surprise is not that he finds capital punishment an abomination, the surprise comes in the last line:
She was similarly disappointing on capital punishment. She seems to support it. Yet it is an abomination....It is always an abuse of power, always an exercise in arrogance -- it admits no possibility of a mistake -- and totally without efficacy. It is not a deterrent, and it endorses the mentality of the killer: Human life is not inviolate.
This last sentence is a bit of a stunner coming from a man who has in the past claimed to be resolutely pro-choice on abortion.
RLC
