See the talking points on Sotomayor the White House is distributing to supporters.
The Politico says that Republicans are in the difficult position of perhaps needing to hold their fire because of the political dangers of attacking a “Latina single mother.”
But the Post says Sotomayor, who was married briefly when she was younger, has no children. And as far as we can tell, they’re right: she has no children.
One of the defining motifs of the early Obama administration has been the repeated Republican effort to reach back to the signature failures of the Bush era to find labels or taglines for hoped-for Obama failures. (The trauma is hard for some on the right to get over.) So now you have conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru has announced that Sotomayor is “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”
It’s hard to believe it now, but there was a time not too long ago when it looked like the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice would be … Alberto Gonzales.
Disaster averted, narrowly.
Everyone is hailing Sonia Sotomayor as (if confirmed) the first Hispanic on the US Supreme Court. But we’ve had a few emailers who point out that, at least by one definition, that’s not true. They point to Benjamin Cardozo who had a relatively brief tenure as an Associate Justice on the court from 1932 until his death in 1938.
Cardozo held what was then informally known as one of the Jewish seats on the Court (he overlapped with Brandeis and was succeeded by Frankfurter.) But his ancestors were Portuguese Jews. That is, they were Sephardic Jews presumably expelled from Portugal in 1497 or who lived as conversos and then later reverted to Judaism after leaving at some later point.
This could of course suggest that a hidden Hispanic seat stood vacant on the Court for a full 71 years until today. But, be that as it may, there’s your asterisk: Sotomayor is the first Hispanic Justice, unless you think that Cardozo was the first.
Late Update: Okay, a smackdown has broken out in the TPM inbox over the meaning of ‘Hispanic’. Several say that ‘Hispanic’ applies only to Spain or former Spanish colonies where they speak Castillian Spanish and not Portugal. I’d always understood the term as applying to the Iberian peninsula in general. And Wikipedia suggests this is or rather was correct but that that meaning has been superseded by a narrower focus on Spain or even just the Spanish colonies. For my part though I’d like to try to make this slightly more complicated. It has been suggested that not a few Spanish Jewish expellees in Europe in the Early Modern Era chose to call themselves ‘Portuguese Jews’ because ‘Spain’ was the national enemy in many of the countries in which they resided — such as England, the Netherlands and even France. Furthermore, some Spanish Jews were expelled from Spain and went to Portugal, only to be expelled from Portugal a few years later. So I’m not sure we should yet stop defending Cardozo’s claim to the first Hispanic Justice title.
Late I Never Liked the AP Update: From TPM Reader WM …
According to the AP stylebook on my desk, Hispanic is “the preferred term for those whose ethnic origin is a Spanish-speaking country. … Refer to people of Brazilian and Portuguese as such, not as Hispanic.”
Cardozo, as you wrote, was of Portuguese descent.
But, remember, perhaps they were crypto-Spanish crypto-Jews (sort of converso scholarship inside joke …)
Jonathan Turley not so high on the Sotomayor pick.
Late Update: Turley elaborated in an appearance a short while ago on MSNBC.
What? Governor of Minnesota doesn’t get to vote on Supreme Court nominations?
As Eric Kleefeld explains, the Minnesota and DC calendars suggest there’s a good chance it will be up to Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) to decide whether or not Al Franken becomes a senator in time to vote on the Sotomayor nomination.
VIDEO: Obama introduces Sotomayor this morning at the White House, and Sotomayor introduces herself to the nation.