Sonia Sotomayor makes the perfect nomination for the Community Organizer in Chief. As a judge, she has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed. She’s also a racist…

“I would hope 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,” said Judge Sotomayor.

And a judicial activist…

And according to liberals and her own judicial colleagues, she’s not too bright.

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.
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The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.”

All of these things point to someone whose nomination liberals would readily support under any circumstances.

But I’d like to remind GOP Senators of the standard for confirming Supreme Court nominees… that it’s absolutely proper to vote AGAINST a nominee based on “philosophical and political views, not just on the narrower grounds of character and temperament” even if they think he or she is “clearly qualified”… the standard that was set in the nominations of Roberts and Alito… by Senator Barack Obama.

UPDATE: I wonder how many Democrat Senators are going to oppose Sotomayor’s nomination because she’s a Latino…

…like they did with Miguel Estrada.

This plunge into the murky deep comes from staff strategy memos we’ve obtained from the days when Democrats ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2001-02. Or, rather, appeared to run the committee. Their real bosses are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the Senators when to sit, speak and roll over–and which Bush judges to confirm or not. Here are some excerpts:
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“They also identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible.”