Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor spent much of the second day of her confirmation hearings backpedaling on speeches she made suggesting a judge should view the law through the filter of personal experiences and bias.
Despite efforts by Democrats to define Sotomayor as someone who relies on the law to make decisions, Republicans repeated the most controversial snippets of her speeches, and sought explanation. More often than not, Sotomayor acknowledged using a poor choice of words or said her statements were misinterpreted and tried to convince the Senate Judiciary Committee and the television viewers that she would be an impartial justice, based on her rulings on the bench for the past 17 years.
“Decision after decision, decision after decision, it is very clear that I don’t base my judgments on my personal experiences or my feelings or my biases,” Sotomayor said after one of many Republican questions about her various speeches regarding personal bias. “All of my decisions show my respect for the rule of law, the fact that regardless about if I identify a feeling about a case, which was part of what that speech did talk about, there are situations where one has reactions to speeches or to activities.”
Sotomayor said she may have chosen her words poorly when she delivered remarks over the years suggesting that impartiality may not be possible when judging cases.
Responding to a barrage of questions from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., about some of her speeches, Sotomayor for the first time seemed to back away from her own comments, which included the declaration that “a wise Latina woman” could reach a better conclusion in a case than a white man.
Sotomayor said she made the statement in an effort to inspire young Hispanic students and lawyers, characterizing them as “a rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” and she conceded “it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that’s clearly not what I do as a judge.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., suggested that opposition to Sotomayor was having some effect because constituents were calling her office out of concern that the Senate is going to send an activist judge to the Supreme Court.
“In my view, because you have agreed with our Republican colleagues 98 percent of the time, I don’t see how you can possibly be considered an activist,” Feinstein said.
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has declared Sotomayor’s confirmation to be a foregone conclusion, said he was “blown away” by Sotomayor’s speeches.
“Do you understand that if I had said anything like that and my reasoning was that I was trying to inspire somebody, they would have had my head?”
