"Respects The Corporate Form"

I missed this the other day.

In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.

"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.

She may want to take whatever direction she wants now, but she's outvoted at the moment. Still, it is possible that the latest Supreme Court Justice understands that a corporate entity given human characteristics for purposes of law but out of the reach of legal culpability for so many of its actions represents a lack of fairness and twisted logic.

This whine is priceless:

"I don't want to draw too much from one comment," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But it "doesn't give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded."

Right, um, there is no corporate form. There are only corporations who have convinced enough conservative jurists over the years that they can claim personhood to protect their own wealth or strike down regulations but not when their companies break the law and those harmed seek accountability.

As I said, not the biggest or most meaningful shift now, but something to keep in mind as Sotomayor's career on the bench continues. The biggest area in which the Court has moved to the right in recent years is on the subject of corporate law, and someday we'll have to do something about that. Maybe Sotomayor can be the beginning of a new trend.

This Election Has Been Brought To You By... Tostitos

Sonia Sotomayor begins her first term as a Supreme Court justice a month early, with a hearing in the Citizens United case that could seriously change the way campaigns are funded, and not for the better. The New York Times had a good editorial on this.

The Supreme Court may be about to radically change politics by striking down the longstanding rule that says corporations cannot spend directly on federal elections. If the floodgates open, money from big business could overwhelm the electoral process, as well as the making of laws on issues like tax policy and bank regulation.

The court, which is scheduled to hear arguments on this issue on Wednesday, is rushing to decide a monumental question at breakneck speed and seems willing to throw established precedents and judicial modesty out the window.

Corporations and unions have been prohibited from spending their money on federal campaigns since 1947, and corporate contributions have been barred since 1907. States have barred corporate expenditures since the late 1800s. These laws are very much needed today. In the 2008 election cycle, Fortune 100 companies alone had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. That dwarfs the $1.5 billion that Federal Election Commission-registered political parties spent during the same election period, or the $1.2 billion spent by federal political action committees.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the limitations on corporate campaign expenditures. In 1990, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and again in 2003, in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, it made clear that Congress was acting within its authority and that the restrictions are consistent with the First Amendment.

In late June, the court directed the parties to address whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. It gave the parties in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission a month to write legal briefs on a question of extraordinary complexity and importance, and it scheduled arguments during the court’s vacation.

All of this is disturbing on many levels. Normally, the court tries not to decide cases on constitutional grounds if they can be resolved more simply. Here the court is reaching out to decide a constitutional issue that could change the direction of American democracy.

Sotomayor's presence means extremely little to this ruling; Anthony Kennedy is likely to decide it, which is how things go on the Court these days, for the most part. If corporations are given the ability to directly fund elections, the country will be even more controlled by their interests than they are currently. For context, 1% of Exxon's profits would have been enough to out-fund John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008 - combined.

If the Roberts Court goes ahead and pulls this trigger, it makes a mockery of his lame "judges are umpires" analogy from his confirmation hearings. They would be overturning an established precedent of over a century. They would be the judicial activists interfering in the electoral process.

It's very scary and progressives should prepare themselves for it by determining their next move. I'd start a raft of suits trying to take away corporate charters in the states.

...SCOTUSBlog sez today's hearing looks bad. Real bad.

Well, we had a good run as a country.

Self-Immolation

John McCain goes on national TV this weekend and talks about his party's problems with Hispanic voters, how there's "much work to be done" and how Sonia Sotomayor is a great American success story. One day later, after claiming to be undecided, he comes out against Sotomayor, claiming that she's "an activist judge who legislates from the bench." Ian Milhiser does a great job showing how conservative activism on the Court is basically repealing the 20th Century.

Repealing the Twentieth Century: In three opinions that read like a tea-bagger’s wet dream, Justice Thomas would have restricted Congress’ power to enact economic regulation to a point unheard of since the Great Depression. A short list of laws that would simply cease to exist in Clarence Thomas’s America includes “the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws.”

Selling Justice To The Highest Bidder: Roberts, Thomas and Alito all joined dissents arguing that a West Virginia coal magnate could literally buy a judge for $3 million to overturn a verdict against his company.

Corporate Immunity From the Law: Joined by Roberts, Alito wrote a dissent arguing that drug companies have almost-total immunity from the law when one of their dangerous products caused a former professional musician to lose her arm and her ability to play music. Roberts, Thomas and Alito also joined a majority opinion giving sweeping immunity to the makers of dangerous medical devices.

Massive Resistance: All three justices joined a radical opinion which not only held that it is unconstitutional for school boards to desegregate public schools, but which audaciously cited Brown v. Board of Education for this proposition.

This Election Brought to You By Wal-Mart: Perhaps most ironic of all, all three of McCain’s justices are poised to declare McCain’s signature legislative accomplishment, campaign finance reform, unconstitutional.

McCain voted for all of the judges leading that charge. In fact, he's voted to confirm EVERY SINGLE JUDGE in his Senate career except for Sotomayor. And that's the larger point. Republicans are so in hock to their right-wing base that they must risk a generational divide with Hispanic voters by voting against a qualified Latina judge:

Most Senate Republicans say opposition to Sotomayor is a principled stand based on the belief that her public speeches reveal a personal bias in her judicial philosophy. Republicans have cited her views on Second Amendment cases, speeches she has given during her time as a federal judge and a key ruling on affirmative action -- all issues that are of sharp interest to conservative-base voters.

But some senators and Republican strategists worry that efforts to shore up support from conservative voters who dominate the GOP primaries could become a missed opportunity to extend an olive branch to Latino voters, who gave just 31 percent of their ballots to McCain last fall.

If you look at the demographic shifts of the country, both with age and ethnicity, you'll see that this is just suicide. But I'm not about to get in the way of it.

Through Judiciary

Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary committee with a vote of 13-6. Only Lindsey Graham joined all the Democrats in supporting her confirmation. With four Republicans on the record as supporting her on the floor of the Senate, her confirmation is assured. She will become the first Latina on the Supreme Court.

The near-united front against a qualified Hispanic really isn't going to help the GOP in the years ahead.

The Bigot In The Room

I saw Pat Buchanan today refer to Frank Ricci as "an American hero" on Hardball. His opponent in the debate, an NAACP lawyer, was measured and calm. But he never brought up what Buchanan wrote just a couple days ago in talking about the GOP's strategy for victory in the future.

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent. [...]

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled. And McCain might be president.

If only John McCain race-baited more, if only Republicans, who have practically nobody but Southern white men left in their party, made MORE overt moves toward Southern white men, then they would receive electoral glory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

There are a couple problems here, I'd submit. One is that Sotomayor isn't black (except in Baltimore.) She's a Latina. Amping up the race-baiting isn't just going to turn off black people (most of whom are already turned-off) it turns off Latinos also.

The second problem is that it likely turns a significant portion of white people also. The GOP's problem isn't that it needs to shore up Alabama--at least not yet. It's problem is, well, basically everywhere else that isn't Alabama. I don't know how bashing Sotomayor makes you more competitive in, say, Colorado or Oregon. I'd assume the opposite.

Altogether, I think this is awful political advice. But it's about what you'd expect from the guy who, as one of Matt's commenters note, told us that Sarah Palin would steal women from Obama. You don't have to be right to do Buchanan's job. Or even sincere. You just have to be very loud.

Pat Buchanan is a bigot. He provides a bigoted viewpoint for hours per day on a supposedly liberal network called MSNBC. Why is that tolerated, like ol' Pat is just a crazy uncle?

...Rachel Maddow is laying into Buchanan right now, it's pretty lively.

Unified Field Theory of Crazy

I think that this ad does it. What a harmonic convergence!



They missed a chance to lump ACORN, Rev. Wright and Communist Cuba in there with Sotomayor and Bill Ayers, but this is really a fine start. Maybe they should start a groundswell for the Obama to nominate the birther who refused combat duty to Afghanistan because the President isn't a natural-born citizen for Secretary of Defense. That would complete the circle.

Boy, If Only Life Worked Like This

Josh Marshall gets this right, it was an Alvy Singer bringing out Marshall McLuhan at the cinema moment:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 “wise Latina” speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who “believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices.”

“So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum’s formulation,” Sessions told Sotomayor.

“My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here,” Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’ apparent surprise. “We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts.”

Cedarbaum agreed.

“I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging,” she told Washington Wire. “We’d both like to see more women on the courts,” she added.

Sessions was clearly flustered by this, causing his lobster bib to flap full into his face and almost tip over his ten-gallon hat.

Perhaps the best part of this is that Judge Cedarbarum and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III were nominated by Ronald Reagan for the federal bench in the same year, 1986, but Sessions didn't make it as far as Cedarbaum, because of "a controversy surrounding comments he made involving the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP."

This won't stop the silliness, but it was an amusing moment to distract us from, for example, Lindsey Graham comparing the "wise Latina" comment to sectarian violence and repression in Iraq.

Supreme Court Nominee Explains Numchucks To Senator

No longer an imagined dream from my childhood:

Sotomayor Hearings Day II

Glenn Beck can today criticize the questioning of Senators toward Judge Sonia Sotomayor, because unlike yesterday, they're actually asking the questions. It's just joyful to watch Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III niggle over 15 year-old statements rather than anything resembling the legal record. You can watch it here.

...it's sad to watch Sotomayor explain precedent to Sessions. He was a judge, you know.



...I forgot to link to Judge Sotomayor's opening statement from yesterday.

Supreme Court Nomination Live

Judge Sotomayor's hearings are happening as we speak. I have a busy day ahead of me and won't be able to follow them very much, but you can watch them live right here:



Like I said, I have a busy day, but I did want to acknowledge Sen. Feinstein's speech, which obliterated the conservative notion that "activist judging" only comes from the left. She laid out multiple cases where the conservative block set new precedents and overturned settled law, and intimated that John Roberts and Sam Alito essentially lied to Congress. It was a rare bout of partisanship from DiFi.

There will not be any questioning today, just opening statements from the members of the committee and Judge Sotomayor's opening comments.

Cue My Eyes Rolling Into The Back Of My Head

The Republicans will trot out Frank Ricci, the firefighter from New Haven, to testify against Sonia Sotomayor at hearings next week. And then we'll all get to hear once again about the poor guy who studied hard - hard! - to pass that promotions test, and then the MAN, in this case represented by a Latina following the established laws on the books which the Supreme Court had to change, knocked him down and took everything he had. He needed that promotion, see, and he was the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority throw out the test because they could have been sued until the Supreme Court changed the law to essentially indemnify them.

The reality of the case doesn't matter, so this will just be a launching pad for a series of "white man's burden" colloquys among Villagers.

Man, the blowhards are going to make me sick next week. Pat Buchanan is probably testing out new slurs as we speak. "Does Sombrero Lady sound pejorative enough? How about Phi Beta Hubcappa?"

The Radical, Activist Roberts Court

Lost in the shuffle of the caterwauling about Sonia Sotomayor and the Ricci decision, aside from the fact that it reflects conservative judicial activism and the making of completely new law, is that it's not even clear law. That must be what you get when you adjudicate by empathy toward white firefighters.

In ruling for a group of white firefighters in New Haven on Monday, the Supreme Court tried to address a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t quandary for many cities and other employers: what they should do when an employment test yields results that overwhelmingly favor whites.

But many legal experts said that instead of setting forth clear new rules, the court’s decision left things as muddled as ever for the nation’s employers — and seemed to ensure much more litigation over the explosive issue of employment discrimination.

“We don’t see clear, bright-line guidance here,” said Lars Etzkorn, a program director with the National League of Cities. “This is going to be good for employment lawyers.”

The Court invented a new standard in applying these tests which will make it more difficult for anyone using such tests for promotions or to address workplace discrimination, from businesses to government employers. The talk the language of "strict originalism" and just being umpires calling balls and strikes, but in reality, they use the means at their disposal to make the decisions that fit a right-wing ideology. John Roberts, with help from Anthony Kennedy, has radically shifted the Court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. emerged as a canny strategist at the Supreme Court this term, laying the groundwork for bold changes that could take the court to the right even as the recent elections moved the nation to the left.

The court took mainly incremental steps in major cases concerning voting rights, employment discrimination, criminal procedure and campaign finance. But the chief justice’s fingerprints were on all of them, and he left clues that the court is only one decision away from fundamental change in many areas of the law.

Whether he will succeed depends on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote. And there is reason to think that the chief justice has found a reliable ally when it counts.

“In the important cases, Kennedy ends up on the right,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, a student of the court and the founder of Scotusblog, which has compiled comprehensive statistics on the current term. The two justices agreed 86 percent of the time.

If the Roberts gang has their way, by September of this year the Court will, in all likelihood, overturn a good bit of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially as it relates to corporate spending, opening up a loophole that could "allow unlimited spending from corporate treasuries for television advertisements and other communications to support or oppose candidates." And Justice Sotomayor, replacing Souter, will have little impact on that.

George W. Bush's legacy of failure and extremism will live on for many, many years.

The Ricci Case And The Sotomayor Nomination

The Supreme Court just handed down their decision in the Ricci case, reversing with a 5-4 count the lower court opinion that the city of New Haven can refuse to apply a promotions test for firefighters because no African-Americans passed it. The city feared a discrimination lawsuit over the test, but the Court basically waved that away.

What's notable is that this case was previously decided by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals by a three-judge panel that included Sonia Sotomayor. And so now we'll hear all about that honky-hating judge reversed again (how does this affect her "reversal rate"?) and the manly men of the Supreme Court helping out those poor white firefighters who worked so hard to pass that test.

Except that Courts of Appeals, who generally follow prior precedent in cases like this, cannot make the sweeping changes that can be made at the SCOTUS level. Far from being a slave to "empathy," Sotomayor followed the law available to her in concurring with the majority decision on her Court. In fact, as Sam Alito wrote in his concurrence today, "But 'sympathy' is not what petitioners have a right to demand. What they have a right to demand is evenhanded enforcement of the law . . . And that is what, until today's decision, has been denied them." The Second Court had no precedent on which to rely to offer that enforcement, and if Sotomayor reversed the District Court ruling in Ricci, she would have been relying on sympathy. Which is what her critics say she always relies on.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog doesn't expect this to affect her nomination much:

Tom Goldstein: Various comments ask about the effect of Ricci on the Sotomayor hearings. The deicsion will certainly be front and center. Her position is the same as Justice Souter's, so I think it it comes across mostly as an ideological disagreement [...]

Re the intersection of Ricci and the Sotomayor nomination, the Supreme Court opinoins have almost no discussion of the court of appeals' ruling. Justice Ginsburg has a short discussion of how the ruling reflected prior Second Circuit precedent.

But of course, he is correct about the decision being front and center. Those on the right wing will certainly spin this as proof positive of Sotomayor's incompetence, or her hatred of white people, etc. This is basically the only thing that could possibly derail her at this point, and the opposition will come up with whatever distortions necessary to try to ensure that. But the charge rings pretty hollow and is based on a misunderstanding of precedent.

Just No Do-Re-Mi In It

I noticed last week a severe pulling back by the conservative elements bashing Sonia Sotomayor, and John Thune lets slip a bit of truth about it:

Nearly a month after President Barack Obama picked her for the Supreme Court, Republican senators say Sonia Sotomayor isn’t serving as the political lightning rod some in their party had hoped she would be.

“She doesn’t have the punch out there in terms of fundraising and recruiting, I think — at least so far,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who most likely will be elected as the No. 4 Republican in Senate leadership this week.

The calculus could certainly change when Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings begin July 13. But the Republican senators’ initial review of Sotomayor’s record, together with the meetings they’ve had with her, have left them doubting that she’ll be controversial enough to help them or hurt the Democrats heading into the 2010 elections.

That's the key, right, that outrage over her doesn't raise the bug bucks. Republicans are making a business decision by pulling up stakes here. Will Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network have enough money for steak dinners now?

You know the economy is tough when even the wingnut welfare recipients are struggling.

Rosen's Redemption

Remember that lady nominated to join the Supreme Court? Sonia something-or-other? Funny, it doesn't seem like the GOP wants to talk about her much anymore. They're on to Democracy, Whisky, Sexy in Iran, and even the wingnut welfare machine of groups making money off of the Sotomayor nomination have started to lay low.

I would guess that somebody read a poll, particularly one including Hispanic voters. And they recognized that going to the mats against her would be completely counter-productive. And now everyone's zipped their lips. Hell, Kenneth Starr endorsed her yesterday.

That doesn't let off the hook those who charged her as a racist and tried to leverage the "white man's burden" theory of politics to make her toxic. It doesn't let off the hook people like Jeffrey Rosen, who lent credence to a bunch of anonymous smears designed to damage her reputation. Rosen is trying to rehabilitate himself with a more measured piece, explaining that you can find bold language and hints to her style in her dissents, not the technical decisions where she upholds settled law. He tries to roll back this charge that she isn't a big thinker by pointing out certain flourishes.

One would hope that everyone has a long memory about Rosen.

...I'm not at all sanguine about whether Sotomayor's presence on the Court can change this dynamic at all, but the current Court really sucks rocks.

Here’s a beaut of a decision from the increasingly brutal and inhumane conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Not content with gutting anti-discrimination legislation, a 5-4 majority has decided that if people are wrongfully convicted they should be punished anyway because, hey, tough on crime!

Ugh.

Kabuki Inc.

There's this interesting dynamic where Senate Republicans are demurring from attacks on Sonia Sotomayor in public while urging their activists to keep them up behind the scenes. But the Raw Story has an even more interesting article up about who may really be behind the most extreme attacks:

Corporate interests posing as a grassroots conservative group are behind attacks on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

The Committee for Justice (CFJ), an astroturf group established by big business in July 2002 to create an appearance of popular support for President Bush’s judicial nominees, is now leading the effort to oppose the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court.

CFJ’s Executive Director Curt Levey has been sending out press releases and making media appearances to promote the theme that Sotomayor is racist and biased in her rulings, drawing his talking points largely from a speech in which she suggested that when it came to race and sex discrimination cases, it was possible 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.”

I knew Curt Levey was one of the instant bobbleheads from the conservative movement suddenly all over TV talking about Sotomayor. I didn't know his organization was a Big Business front group.

I'm wondering what they have to fear from Sotomayor, however. On this issue, her record doesn't appear to be all that different from the current construction of the Court, which is clearly tilted toward big business. Maybe it's just a reflexive partisan pose. But if there's something in Sotomayor's past that would actually make business tremble, I'd love to know what it is.

Gingrich Concedes The Point; Will Others?

It's very interesting to me that Newt Gingrich dialed down his description of Sonia Sotomayor as a racist, even if, in context, he didn't. Surely we know how this works - we saw it last week with the President. Obama took one step back on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, conceding the point but also set it in context, but it set off a flurry from the commentariat, claiming that Obama "caved," etc. Now Gingrich does essentially the same thing, conceding the point but adding a whole bunch of context actually keeping his claim alive that Sotomayor is a racist. And while this gives Republicans space to welcome the return of civility to the debate, it keeps them on the defensive and in a reactive position as well. Clearly calling Sotomayor a racist wasn't exactly working out for them, so they had to defuse that. But the backpedaling is historically the kind of thing Republicans NEVER do. Could they be understanding the damaging nature of their rhetoric?

Of course, Gingrich isn't alone, and there are plenty of other ways for Democrats to continue to exploit this and put the pressure on. In fact, Gingrich's admission, despite its fatuousness, gives them more ammunition - "even Newt Gingrich disavowed this," etc. For example, will Republicans be made to answer for Pat Buchanan's comparison of Sotomayor to white supremacists? In the distant past, Buchanan was a symbol for a particular strain of xenophobic ugliness. Now he's a respected member of the media community and that "liberal" network MSNBC. Will he be held to account?

Given Pat Buchanan's history of clear bigotry - most recently demonstrated in his reminder last night that he supported and continues to defend a white supremacist - there really isn't any good reason for MSNBC to continue putting him on the air. The man is a bigot, plain and simple. In light of the hot water MSNBC has gotten into in the past for bigoted comments by its employees, you would think they would want to distance themselves from the likes Buchanan.

But what's really extraordinary is that MSNBC brings Buchanan on air to talk about race issues. It gives Pat Buchanan a platform from which to call other people racists. Granted, if there's someone who knows racists better than Pat Buchanan does, I can't think of who it would be. But his is not the kind of expertise MSNBC should be inflicting upon its viewers.

...by the way, this is completely divorced from the larger debate over Sotomayor's confirmation, which is assured. The "fight" is a bit of a shadow play for the base. But conceding the point doesn't help that cause.

...the Chairman of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, won't retract the racism charge. Wedge away, Democrats.

...This also brings up a larger question about that liberal network MSNBC. Giving space to an out-and-out bigot like Pat Buchanan, who's on that channel more often than the peacock, reflects really poorly on them. Not to mention the three hours of unadulterated horseshit in the morning.

The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.

This says more about their qualifications to discuss public policy and labor relations than it says about unions. To pick just one obvious example, UPS is unionized -- and the company made more than $3 billion last year. That's "billion" with a "b," and those are profits, not revenues.

Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

Oh, and GE owns NBC-Universal, which owns MSNBC, which pays Joe Scarborough a handsome salary (and the unionized workers who help get his show on the air considerably less.)

Scarborough, you recall, is the former GOP Congressman who represented Michael Griffin pro bono, the man who killed abortion provider Dr. David Gunn, in his murder case.

"I am not a racialist, but, und this is a big but..."

(Title from an obscure Monty Python sketch)

The Sotomayor debate continues to reveal the absolute worst of human nature, driven by conservative white men with serious issues over race. Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, two of the biggest loudmouths in this debate, share an aide who plead guilty to karate chopping a pedestrian and calling her the N word. For his part, Buchanan called the Supreme Court nominee a quota queen who practices "race-based justice," basing this on a quote and none of the facts of her record (in Ricci she was bound by the law and precedent, and quotas had nothing to do with it, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out to him today). Does everyone remember when Pat Buchanan was radioactive to the party and brought down George W. Bush's hopes in 1992? Now he's on the "liberal" MSNBC more than the peacock.

And now there's a new player in this debate, Manuel Miranda, who you may remember from stealing Democratic files when he was working for Bill Frist. Within the space of a few hours today, he basically called Mitch McConnell gay for resisting a filibuster for Sotomayor, and then he slandered all African-Americans.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.

To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.

Not like those dirty African-Americans, you see.

This is just a disaster for the GOP, and it gets worse and worse.

A White Christian Party

Howard Dean got in some trouble for characterizing Republicans that way in 2005. He was merely citing the numbers:

PRINCETON, NJ -- More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.

Blogger is bloggered and won't display images, but the rundown of the poll is here.

This really informs the Sotomayor debate. With conservatives retreating to their ideological corners, it's not hard to expect a certain paranoia to creep in. White conservatives see the world changing and cannot get a handle on it. They believe that this diversity and multiculturalism targets them and their homogenous group, and they imagine that the nonwhite have an unfair advantage over them. It's perverse, but in context I get it.

And the world is only getting more diverse and more tolerant. Hard to see where conservatives go from here.

Not Your Father's Supreme Court

Without the Internet, this level of detail almost certainly wouldn't exist, but we can now paint a pretty full picture of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's decisions on the 2nd Circuit Court, a body of evidence that can be used to form an opinion about what kind of Supreme Court Justice she will make. And it's a mixed bag. There are some hopeful signs, like her ruling in Hayden v. Pataki, where she argued that felon disenfranchisement laws do fall under the purview of the Voting Rights Act, suggesting an inclusive treatment of the franchise for all citizens. She based this on the plain reading of the statutory text of the Voting Rights Act. She dissented in the case of Pappas v. Giuliani, arguing that an anti-Semitic rant sent by the plaintiff was not enough to have him fired by the NYPD, and that he deserved a jury trial to determine if his First Amendment rights were violated. This is a powerful endorsement of the First Amendment, even in a case where the speech is distasteful. Her dissent in a strip-search case shows her defense of civil rights and the unreasonable search and seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment.

At the same time, in Jocks v. Tavernier, she strongly upheld, and convinced her Republican colleagues, police power and broad grounds for arrest in a case where a man who needed help with his truck in an emergency ended up being arrested and losing his job. And her general temperament is of a judge who hews extremely close to the law, never mind the bleatings of the right. Far from being a conquistador or leading with her race, she actually favored the law over blanket claims of discrimination the majority of the time.

Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1 [...]

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

I truly value this variety of treatment of the Sotomayor record, all of which came from blogs and not the traditional media. And I think you can get a full picture of Sotomayor from this treatment. What come sup for me is the overwhelming feeling that this is a highly qualified, competent, brilliant judge whose opinion sits pretty much in the middle of mainstream legal thought. Maybe in past years, that would be enough to put her as the swing vote on the Court. In the current makeup, it puts her on the far left - because this Court has moved sharply to the right over the past 30 years, particularly on corporate issues.

Here's a simple way to expose the Myth of Balance. In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.

First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.

Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.

Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart. (The parallel between White-Stevens-Powell and Breyer-Stevens-Souter is very close; true, Ginsburg is somewhat to the left of Stewart in many domains, but their voting patterns and general approaches are pretty close.)

Finally we would have to assume that Roberts would vote more or less like Rehnquist (which is to say, definitely to the left of Scalia and Thomas) and that Alito would vote more or less like Burger (definitely to the left of Rehnquist).

To say the least, all this would represent a radical change in the Court's composition -- so radical that liberals cannot even fantasize about it. But this radically changed Court would be essentially identical to the supposedly conservative Court of 1980! [...]

The upshot of all these shifts is that what was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative. What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists.

Cass Sunstein, who works in the Obama Administration, wrote that, and he's absolutely right. And Sotomayor does nothing to rebalance this debate. And I don't know that the President could have gone further than he did. She was generally a good pick. But that's a failure to stand up to conservative messaging. The end result for the country is that the Court shifts to the right, and nobody blinks an eye.