A show of hypocrisy as Republicans bash Sotomayor

Republicans have a great knack at 1-upping Democrats in every unethical thing possible. Take, for example, Mark Sanford’s extravagant affair with an Argentinean woman. It makes John Edwards look like an amateur. Or former Vice President Dick Cheney’s approval of torture – while Al Gore was too busy hugging trees. In the realm of political pundits, Republican Ann Coulter remains unchallenged. And now, Alabama Senator Jeffrey Sessions’ racial history is making Sonya Sotomayor look like, at best, yet another victim of the “white privileged male” mentality.

Sotomayor is being revered as potentially the first Latina justice to take a seat in the United States Supreme Court. But she is also being assaulted by right-wing conservatives over her 2001 comment regarding the role of her ethnicity in the United States: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”.

To resolve the paradox: Why would it be an important milestone in US history that a Latina judge sits on the Supreme Court, if race didn’t matter?

This hypocrisy of racial politics is being perpetrated by a charming top GOP pick: Mister Jeffrey Sessions. The same senator who believes the ACLU and NAACP are “Communist-inspired” and “un-Constitutional”, that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK”, minus the “pot smokers”, and that white civil rights lawyers are a “disgrace to his race.” Despite this, Sessions believed he was fully entitled to interrogate the Supreme Court nominee on the racism charges last week.

Why the fury over the wisdom of this accomplished señora? Sotomayor’s comment sparked a row in Washington because it is a reality that most Americans refuse to publicly acknowledge. The experience that Sotomayor was referring to runs parallel to a deep and turbulent racial disparity in this country’s history. Let’s take, for example, a recent study from the Pew Hispanic Center comparing home ownership rates between whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics.

The study quotes that “in 2007, blacks and Hispanics borrowed higher amounts than did whites with similar incomes, exposing themselves to greater debt relative to their incomes.” What are the socio-economic repercussions of this blatant inequality? While the majority white population (including Sessions and Roberts) enjoy luxuries like vacations and the ability to afford higher education, struggling blacks and Hispanics are barely making ends meet. For aspiring Supreme Court justices like Sotomayor, this means working much harder to attain the same level of merit as their white counterparts.

Despite the figures putting her at a relative disadvantage to her white counterpart Sessions, how wise did the Latina manage to become? Ms. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and attained her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. After which George H.W. Bush himself nominated her to the District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1991.

Yes, that’s right folks; a Republican president has already previously nominated Sotomayor to a federal court.

Also, 1991 is the same year that George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nomination John G. Roberts was fighting hard on the side of the Oklahoma Board of Education to ensure the re-segregation of its schools. Roberts, a current Supreme Court justice, was also quoted in 1983 saying, “I think this audience would be pleased that we are trying to grant legal status to their [Hispanic-Americans] illegal amigos.”

As expected, Sessions wasn’t up in arms about his fellow Republican’s concerning comments at the time of Roberts’ nomination in 2005. His selectivity in addressing potentially racist Supreme Court justices seems to indicate a preference in minority women over white males. How ironic.

But perhaps Sessions has a right to harass others about racism.

He seems to be more familiar with it than the rest of us.