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.”
“It’s pretty disturbing,” Levey told The Hill. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial … allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality. But it’s almost like she’s proud that her biases and personal experiences will cloud her impartiality.”
CFJ was created at the urging of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MO) – who has himself been plagued by allegations of racism. In 2002, as Senate Democrats stalled the nomination of Judge Charles Pickering to the Federal Court of Appeals over Pickering’s alleged racial insensitivity and opposition to abortion, Lott recruited C. Boyden Gray to create a fake grassroots organization to drum up support for Pickering’s confirmation.
Gray had been White House counsel during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who threw a fundraising party for the new organization. Former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was also involved in the group’s creation, and the lobbying firm of Barbour Griffith & Rogers — founded by Haley Barbour, who is now governor of Mississippi — took an active role in its fundraising.
Perhaps Gray’s strongest qualification to head CFJ was his background in the creation of “astroturf” organizations, such as the anti-tax group Citizens for a Sound Economy (now part of Freedom Works). These groups routinely solicit anonymous corporate donations, which are used to promote pro-business candidates and issues by running advertising campaigns designed to appeal to cultural conservatives. They also use their influence to oppose judges whom they feel to be too populist.
President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court points to a dilemma that will likely plague his presidency: How does a "post-racialist" president play identity politics?
What is most notable about the Sotomayor nomination is its almost perfect predictability. Somehow we all simply know -- like it or not -- that Hispanics are now overdue for the gravitas of high office. And our new post-racialist president is especially attuned to this chance to have a "first" under his belt, not to mention the chance to further secure the Hispanic vote. And yet it was precisely the American longing for post-racialism -- relief from this sort of racial calculating -- that lifted Mr. Obama into office.
The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America's first black president, and a man promising the "new," we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.
This contradiction has always been at the heart of the Obama story. On the one hand there was the 2004 Democratic Convention speech proclaiming "only one America." And on the other hand there was the race-baiting of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Does this most powerful man on earth know himself well enough to resolve this contradiction and point the way to a genuinely post-racial America?
The Sotomayor nomination suggests not. Throughout her career Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated a Hispanic chauvinism so extreme that it sometimes crosses into outright claims of racial supremacy, as in 2001 when she said in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, "a wise Latina woman . . . would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male."
The White House acknowledges that this now famous statement -- both racist and dim-witted -- was turned up in the vetting process. So we can only assume that the president was aware of it, as well as Judge Sotomayor's career-long claim that ethnicity and gender are virtual determinisms in judging: We need diversity because, as she said in her Berkeley lecture, "inherent physiological or cultural differences . . . make a difference in our judging." The nine white male justices who decided the Brown school-desegregation case in 1954 might have felt otherwise, as would a president seeking to lead us toward a new, post-racial society.
But of course "post-racialism" is not a real idea. It is an impression, a chimera that grows out of a very specific racial manipulation that I have called "bargaining." Here the minority makes a bargain with white society: I will not "guilt" you with America's centuries of racism if you will not hold my minority status against me. Whites love this bargain because it allows them to feel above America's racist past and, therefore, immune to charges of racism. By embracing the bargainer they embrace the impression of a world beyond racial division, a world in which whites are innocent and minorities carry no anger. This is the impression that animates bargainers like Mr. Obama or Oprah Winfrey with an irresistible charisma. Even if post-racialism is an obvious illusion -- a bargainer's trick as it were -- whites are flattered by believing in it.
But the Sotomayor nomination shows that Mr. Obama has no idea what a post-racial society would look like. In selling himself as a candidate to the American public he is a gifted bargainer beautifully turned out in post-racial impressionism. But in the real world of Supreme Court nominations, where there is a chance to actually bring some of that idealism down to earth, he chooses a hardened, divisive and race-focused veteran of the culture wars he claims to transcend.
I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites. The latter form of politics is grounded in being what I call a challenger -- i.e., someone who presumes that whites are racist until they prove otherwise by granting preferences of some kind to minorities. Whites quietly seethe at challengers like Jesse Jackson who use the moral authority of their race's historic grievance to muscle for preferential treatment. Mr. Obama has been loved precisely because he was an anti-Jackson, a bargainer who grants them innocence before asking for their support. So when Mr. Obama plays identity politics -- as in the Sotomayor nomination -- he starts to look too much like the challenger. Still, if he doesn't allow identity to trump merit so that he can elevate people like Judge Sotomayor, he angers the minorities who so lavishly supported him. So far he is more the captive of America's ongoing racial neurosis than the man who might liberate us from it.
Judge Sotomayor is the archetypal challenger. Challengers see the moral authority that comes from their group's historic grievance as an entitlement to immediate parity with whites -- whether or not their group has actually earned this parity through development. If their group is not yet competitive with whites, the moral authority that comes from their grievance should be allowed to compensate for what they lack in development. This creates a terrible corruption in which the group's historic grievance is allowed to count as individual merit. And so a perverse incentive is created: Weakness and victimization are rewarded over development. Better to be a troublemaker than to pursue excellence.
Sonia Sotomayor is of the generation of minorities that came of age under the hegemony of this perverse incentive. For this generation, challenging and protesting were careerism itself. This is why middle- and upper middle-class minorities are often more militant than poor and working-class minorities. America's institutions -- universities, government agencies, the media and even corporations -- reward their grievance. Minority intellectuals, especially, have been rewarded for theories that justify grievance.
And here we come to Judge Sotomayor's favorite such ingenuity: disparate impact. In the now celebrated Ricci case the city of New Haven, Conn., threw out a paper and pencil test that firefighters were required to take for promotion because so few minorities passed it. In other words, the test had a disparate and negative impact on minorities, so the lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci -- a white male with dyslexia who worked 10 hours a day to pass the test at a high level -- was effectively denied promotion because he was white. Judge Sotomayor supported the city's decision to throw out the test undoubtedly because of her commitment to disparate impact -- a concept that invariably makes whites accountable for minority mediocrity.
Challengers are essentially team players. Their deepest atavistic connection is to their aggrieved race, ethnicity or gender. Toward the larger society that now often elevates and privileges them, they carry a lingering bad faith -- and sometimes a cavalier disregard where whites are concerned, as with Judge Sotomayor in the Ricci case.
With the Sotomayor nomination, Mr. Obama has made the same mistake his wife made in her "This is the first time I am proud of my country" remark: bad faith toward an America that has shown him only good faith.
Shelby Steele has been writing a version of this article for 25 years straight. That doesn't make him wrong, but he's a bit of a one note Johnny. What's different about this one is for once he gives black folks a break. Somewhat fashionably, he picks on Hispanics.
His article is cliched and derivative, and he makes a bad call on Sotomayor IMO. Whereas Steele and others decry her as abysmally unqualified, in fact she is obviously qualified, if also middling. The gripe that Sotomayor is a political pick is totally legit IMO but it is also trivial.
All the picks are political.
The beefs that Sotomayor is a racist and unreasonably sympathetic to plaintiffs is not reflected by the *full data set* IMO, and blowing her up into some kind of Quetzalcoatl of the Reconquista is some bush league bullshit, in the worst possible taste.
06-07-2009
Bender
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
the article fits well in a "who's attacking sotomayer" thread though...
06-07-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Shelby Steele, for one.
06-07-2009
Bender
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
:lol that's a 10-4 !
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
The overhauling mythology is the elitist coterie that elevates *undeserving minorities* to prominence, or *lynches * them in the press if they are too conservative.
For me the irony is that Sotomayor might turn out to be among the more conservative picks on Obama's list for this job.
06-08-2009
PixelPusher
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
lol at conservatives not seeing the huge identity politics log in their own eyes.
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
The prevailing conservative take on Sotomayor is exactly wrong on the most important point IMO. She's not all that liberal.
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Quote:
Originally Posted by PixelPusher
lol at conservatives not seeing the huge identity politics log in their own eyes.
It's tedious. They used to be bombastic critics. Now they are players.
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
I suppose it is a point of guile to characterize probable moderates as firebreathing racialists....
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
...so that when GOP opposition to Obama's future appointments plunges directly into a psychological fugue, it won't seem so conspicuous.
I heard it was shattered. That sucks.... I guess it's time to bust out the rascal.
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Quote:
Originally Posted by jman3000
I heard it was shattered. That sucks.... I guess it's time to bust out the rascal.
She went to meet the senators anyway. The crutches worked fine.
06-08-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
According to Fox, she met with the WH before receiving treatment.
06-08-2009
Marcus Bryant
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
The overhauling mythology is the elitist coterie that elevates *undeserving minorities* to prominence, or *lynches * them in the press if they are too conservative.
For me the irony is that Sotomayor might turn out to be among the more conservative picks on Obama's list for this job.
How might you define "conservative" in this context?
06-08-2009
EricB
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Yay more racists!
06-09-2009
Winehole23
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcus Bryant
How might you define "conservative" in this context?
I probably put accent in the wrong place. Saying she's *not all that liberal* is probably closer to the mark. She appears to be clearly more conservative than Souter on issues of civil liberty and state power.
06-09-2009
FromWayDowntown
Re: Whose Really Attacking Sotomayor
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
I probably put accent in the wrong place. Saying she's *not all that liberal* is probably closer to the mark. She appears to be clearly more conservative than Souter on issues of civil liberty and state power.
I agree with this and believe that confirmation of Judge Sotomayor might actually nudge the Court slightly more to the right in a general sense. There seems to be a much better chance that she'll side with the Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito block in at least some cases -- moreso than there was with Justice Souter -- also making Justice Kennedy's vote slightly less important.
