Elizabeth Schulte examines the record of Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

[Joanne98]

THE LEADING lights of the Republican right are furious about Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as a justice for the Supreme Court.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee hurriedly got the message out on his Web site: "Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the 'Extreme Court'...If she is confirmed, then we need to take the blindfold off Lady Justice."

Arch-conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh added: "Here you have a racist--you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist."

Only a Neanderthal like Huckabee or Limbaugh could spin the nomination of the first Latina to be a justice of the Supreme Court--a woman who grew up in a Bronx housing project, raised by her widowed Puerto Rican mother--into a threat to the American way of life.

The ravings of the right aside, it's almost certain that Sotomayor will get Senate approval, and replace the liberal-leaning David Souter, who is retiring in October.

But the left shouldn't start celebrating. In the days after Obama announced the nomination, even the mainstream media had established that Sotomayor was far from the radical--or even liberal--that conservatives were complaining about.

As columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote in the Washington Post:

Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made.

And even though they should support her confirmation, liberals would be foolish to embrace Sotomayor as one of their own because her record is clearly that of a moderate. It is highly unlikely that she will push the court to the left. Indeed, on many issues of concern to business, she is likely to make the Chamber of Commerce perfectly happy.

In fact, the record of Sotomayor--appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush in 1992, and to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Bill Clinton six years later--is rightfully giving liberals and liberal organizations reason to pause.

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http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/29/taking-the-middle-ground