Disgraced former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik has been indicted by a DC grand jury for lying to White House officials when he was being vetted for his failed Secretary of Homeland Security appointment.
Kerik’s lawyer, Barry H. Berke told WCBS that the indictment was an example of the DOJ’s “overzealous pursuit of high-profile public figures.”
I can’t say I agree with that. But being indicted for lying to folks in the Bush White House Counsel’s office does seem a bit rich. And Kerik has so much real sleaze to work with.
So much sleaze, so little time.
It seems the tide may be turning against Benjamin Cardozo’s candidacy to serve, in a time warp sense of the term, as the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Over at USNews Robert Schlesinger finds the official US government definition of ‘Hispanic’ (as defined by the Census Bureau) which they define as “persons who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish cultures.”
I’m glad we’re in the post-racial era so we can get on to discussing whether Judge Sotomayor is a luke-warm IQ affirmative action hire.
Let the battle begin! A new pro-Sotomayor group has a TV ad going up today. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
President George H.W. Bush, upon announcing his nomination of Clarence Thomas: “He is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor.”
Obama jokes about getting upgraded to the presidential suite at Caesar’s Palace. Watch.
So far the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor are much more revealing about her conservative critics than they are about her. I flagged Sen. Inhofe’s statement yesterday. Here are some new morsels from the right:
National Review Online‘s Mark Krikorian: “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English… and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.”
Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb: “Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl — that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true ‘vanguard of societal ideas and changes.'”
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Monica Novotny just flayed Curt Levey, one of the anti-Sotomayor talking heads a few minutes ago. Levey foundered around until he grasped ahold of the Jeffrey Rosen TNR piece on Sotomayor that, curiously, Rosen hasn’t been anywhere on TV to defend.
The push on the right, as we’ve seen, is that Sonia Sotomayor is the dread ‘judicial activist’, someone who uses the vast powers of a judgeship or, potentially, a spot on the top court to ‘legislate’ from the bench or impose her own policy or ideological vision on the country. Some of that is conservative judicial boilerplate. But clearly there are different kinds of judges on the right and left — ones who stick more tightly to cobbling together decisions from existing precedent and others with a more expansive and ambitious judicial philosophy.
Unfortunately for Republicans, though, Sotomayor seems to be in the former camp. This is the upshot of Adam Liptak’s piece in this morning’s Times, who writes, in part …
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial opinions are marked by diligence, depth and unflashy competence. If they are not always a pleasure to read, they are usually models of modern judicial craftsmanship, which prizes careful attention to the facts in the record and a methodical application of layers of legal principles.
…
But they reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor’s decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.
What Liptak is saying here doesn’t line up precisely with the activist vs. not activist question. But it strongly suggests this is not someone who falls into the more expansive, activist category. And if that’s borne out by the coming scrutiny of her record, it suggests that the GOP line on her may be even more feeble than one might expect.