Supreme Battle

Tonight I watched a clip of ABC news coverage about the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court - just after reading MoveOn's talking points about the same nomination.

I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems like President Obama made a great choice. As I watched the ABC news report, I wondered about the news media in this country, which provides free air-time for conservative arguments, but gives much, much less coverage to the liberal point of view. The ABC piece was entirely composed of Republican complaints about the nomination - tired arguments that the judge might be "activist."

(There is this complete fiction that the corporate media push - that liberal judges are "activist," and conservative judges hew to the literal meaning of the Constitution. It's not that simple. Here's one discussion of the question.)

The ABC piece concluded with the news reader predicting that the Republicans would tread carefully in plotting their opposition to the pick because Sotomayor is a Latina, and the Republicans don't want to lose any more of this constituency. The way it was phrased emphasized the politics of the nomination, rather than Sotomayor's excellent qualifications.