In the last legislative session, one controversial bill would have wiped the slate clean for someone convicted of a single misdemeanor. Proponents argued that people who chose the straight path shouldn’t have an old conviction hanging over their heads.
But what if they weren’t rehabilitated? Such a law would hamper people with a need to know about someone’s past.
Wouldn’t it be nice if life came with a big eraser for every bonehead move we made? Or for comments made in a fit of anger, foggy understanding or misplaced enthusiasm?
Honk if you’ve ever made a remark and now wish you could delete it.
This must have gone through Sonia Sotomayor’s mind a time or two in the last couple of weeks. Is there anybody left who hasn’t heard the “wise Latina” remark?
More than a few pundits have fussed that every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee brought it up. The Supreme Court nominee answered each time, plus a few dozen more in the media.
You’d think they expected a bona fide review of her record instead of the political theater these hearings have become. Clearly, the Republican members – mindful that they didn’t have the votes to derail the nomination and that they will be courting the Hispanic vote in two short years – stuck to the script. The “wise Latina” comment was safe territory.
But it raises the question: Is one remark a revealing look into the workings of Judge Sotomayor’s mind or is it, after all, just one remark?
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s ranking Republican, once answered that question: “I am loose with my tongue on occasion.”
He was addressing the same committee he now serves. A Reagan pick in 1986 to serve as a U.S. District judge in Alabama, Sessions was under fire for his own comments. “I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or communist but I mean no harm by it,” he told the committee. He also declared, “I am not a racist.”
The committee wasn’t convinced. His nomination failed on a 10-to-8 vote, with two Republicans joining the Democrats. The American Bar Association gave Sessions its lowest rating.
Can we conclude that Sessions is not the same guy in 2009 that he was in the 1980s, when he called a black U.S. Assistant Attorney “boy” and disparaged the NAACP?
If the answer is yes, then I guess we can move past the “wise Latina” comment.
I tuned into the hearings just to see and hear the lady for myself – on PBS, which offered the exchanges at length and not commercial television’s usual 10-second sound bite. Captured on the small screen was a very smart, focused and knowledgeable individual. Her questioners only threw her off her game once, and that was when Sen. Lindsay Graham probed her about lawyer evaluations of judges published in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary. Some called her “nasty,” “overly aggressive,” “a bit of a bully.” Graham questioned her temperament.
She faltered a moment and then responded that she asks tough questions, an answer consistent with other comments in the evaluation. The American Bar Association gave her its highest rating.
By the last day, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was still grumbling that her testimony was muddled and confusing. Graham, however, admitted that while some of Sotomayor’s comments “bug the hell out of me,” most of her opinions were mainstream. She is not an activist, he concluded.
The White House has described Sotomayor as a moderate who “often forges consensus” and has agreed with her more conservative fellow jurists more often than she disagreed.
Sotomayor will likely prove to be not as scary as conservatives imagined but, like Obama himself, not as liberal as progressives had hoped.
© New Mexico News Services 2009