The GOP's Canny Hit Plan on Sotomayor

It doesn't much matter whether Alabama GOP Senator Jeff Sessions speaks for himself or Rush Limbaugh when he goes for the jugular during his hectoring of Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearing. The shadow of Limbaugh and the ultra-conservative hit attackers will hang heavy over the Senate Judiciary hearing room. Their hit points against Sotomayor can be recited in our sleep. She's too activist, too far out liberal, too pro victim's rights, affirmative action, civil liberties, and for the more rabid, a closet identity politics baiter.

None of this is true. Sotomayor has played it tight to the vest in her decisions, rulings and opinions on the appellate court. So tight, that she has drawn criticism from a prisoner who says she stiffed him on his appeal, and consumer and abortion rights groups who are cautious, if not outright leery of her.

Given the high stakes, the intense media and public scrutiny she's gotten, and the hard pounding from the right, the great fear is that Sotomayor could massage or even retreat from her moderate views on law and politics during the hearings. It's not an unfounded fear.

Sessions and company are not concerned with derailing her confirmation. Barring some monumental gaffe or disclosure, the confirmation is a done deal. The goal is to bully, cow, and badger Sotomayor on the hit points to insure that she toes the line not solely before the panel, but on the bench. The GOP hit plan is to send a firm message to the Obama administration that conservative politics and judicial and legal philosophy remains a potent force in court decisions on issues of race, gender, the environment, consumer, and civil liberties and criminal justice issues that future courts and future justices must decide.
The GOP attackers also are determined to use Sotomayor as their foil in their fierce and on-going battle to influence public opinion. This is especially crucial since there's little chance to stop her confirmation.

The instant Obama announced Sotomayor as his court pick, the massive effort to tar and brand Sotomayor as a race biased, judicial activist kicked into high gear. News clips, accounts, and commentators endlessly looped her reference to being a "wise Latina" on nightly broadcasts and in editorial pages. The aim was to hang the tag of activist judge on her. The Supreme Court's narrow reversal of her appellate court ruling against the New Haven white firefighters in their reverse discrimination affirmative action suit also was aimed at discrediting Sotomayor. Since polls show that a significant percent of whites oppose race based affirmative action programs, her decision supposedly marked her as a flawed, compromised, and biased judge. Hitting hard on Sotomayor as a race hawk and judicial activist paid another small dividend. In private meetings with moderate Democratic and conservative Republican Senators immediately after her nomination, she backpedaled from the wise Latina reference. She called it a poor choice of words. She followed that with another concession by resigning her membership in the Belizean Grove, a tame, moderate, mostly women's forum and discussion group.

She'll also be badgered to recant her 12 year affiliation with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Fund waged legal battles against job discrimination, and for bilingual education and minority voting rights. This won´t be the last mea culpa she´ll be required to make for her alleged racism before she´s confirmed.

The conservative assault has already sowed doubts about Sotomayor among much of the public. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in mid June found that the overwhelming majority of respondents backed her confirmation. A CNN poll at the end of the month found that the number of those who supported her had plunged to less than fifty percent; forty percent now opposed her confirmation.

A slip or a too confrontational pose by her during the hearings will instantly be pounced on and held up by conservative attackers as proof that Sotomayor doesn't have the right stuff to be a fair and impartial judge.

She'll be under tremendous pressure to assure Senators that she'll play it strictly by the moderate and conservative playbook on any and all decisions that even remotely touch on race and class issues on the bench, as well as abortion and other issues that are traditional conservative causes.

Sotomayor understands what's at stake, and that her every word will be taken by conservatives as a virtual etching on the Ten Commandment stone. She's already been through the wringer enough to know not to give her conservative hit attackers any more ammunition to take lethal pot shots at her. Hopefully, she'll do that without sacrificing any of her legal and personal beliefs in the process.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com