In Response To GOP Allegations Of Racial Extremism Judiciary Committee Releases More Sotomayor Documents
The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted documents to its website relating to Judge Sonia Sotomayor's tenure on the board of a group called LatinoJustice PRLDEF (formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund).
The release comes on a holiday Friday after the committee's ranking member, Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL) called the group "extreme" and demanded the White House release them.
Yesterday, White House Counsel Greg Craig sent a letter to Sessions, calling his demands out of line. "You have now individually sought from a third party, LatinoJustice PRLDEF...documents that were not written, edited, reviewed, or approved by Judge Sotomayor," Craig wrote.
The documents you are now seeking are not relevant to her nomination, just as similar documents not written, edited, or approved by past nominees have not been viewed as relevant to the Committee's consideration of those nominees.
Anti-Sotomayor groups are no doubt poring over the memos, looking for controversial details, and, though the White House is quick to point out that Sotomayor isn't responsible for them, their timing and defensiveness indicates they may be concerned that some of the papers will be politically embarrassing.
Sotomayor's supporters and the White House have compared LatinoJustice PRLDEF to the NAACP Legal Fund and similar groups. For his part, Sessions once called the NAACP "un-American."
Josh
Matt
Eric
Brian
"Anti-Sotomayor groups are no doubt poring over the memos, looking for controversial details"
- well, obviously. You've had your fun with Sanford (and now Palin)..
:-)
July 3, 2009 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Palin quit, she couldn't stand the heat so she got out of the kitchen. Sanford wasn't forced to have an affair and then lie repeatedly.
As for Sotomayor, she is a woman of strong character. Something the republicans seem to be short of lately.
July 3, 2009 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
common sense keeps tugging at me that Palin's resignation was a stake at a pre-emptive move attempting to deaden some future shoe to fall.
July 4, 2009 1:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Sotomayor situation has no relationship to the Palin situation. Amazing that you compared them at all. But I am not worried. I think that Republicans will come to grips with the fact that they will be the minority party for years to come if they jilt Hispanics. Of course, it may already be far too late for them to recoup their standing with Hispanics. Amazing the rampant racism still so obvious in Republican circles.
July 4, 2009 10:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
The very idea of Jeff Sessions calling any group "extreme" is laughable. His version of mainstream is the KKK and it's like.
July 3, 2009 8:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seriously, is this group any more extreme than the GOP?
July 3, 2009 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course not, dr. But to righties like Sessions, any group that is not defending only rich white guys is racist, unamerican and extreme.
July 4, 2009 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Puerto Rican Defense fund thing is just a last ditch effort by Sessions to find anything to attack Sotomayor with.
He is obviously playing to he base but in the process will be further alienating Latino groups.
July 4, 2009 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
He doesn't care about alienating the Latinos, none of them fought for his side during the Civil War.
July 4, 2009 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
But there, he would be wrong. Latinos and Hispanics did fight for the Confederacy...
http://crm.cr.nps.gov/archive/20-11/20-11-31.pdf
July 4, 2009 10:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Technically accurate, and thank you, but in the modern context this is meaningless, i.e., the ancestors of the lopsidedly overwhelming majority of present-day Latinos did not fight in the Civil War at all.
July 7, 2009 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, the Puerto Rican Defense Fund does represent Puerto Rocans in their struggle for equality. But much like past discrimination against Blacks in the South who for years put up with the harshest types of discrimination by folks just like Sessions using the same bogus rules he is using, Southern law makers continue to try to legislate discrimination by trying to keep the status quo.. Amazing that Sessions thinks we will not call him on his racism. Thank God for the spiritual enlightenment of most of the nation that has drug the South kicking and screaming out of their institutionalized racism. But we must be vigilant because law makers like Sessions will try and try to maintain racism with these outlandish attempts to blame racism on the victims of oppression in an attempt to keep Blacks and Hispanics in their place.
July 4, 2009 10:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm reading through all these documents, and all I'm getting, so far, is an education in the hideous discrimination that was occurring in the 1970s and 1980s.
July 4, 2009 10:19 PM | Reply | Permalink