"I don't doubt there are legitimate areas of criticism regarding Sotomayor's lengthy legal career".

I am beginning to doubt if there are. Why have there not been incendiary quotes from some of her 380 written opinions. It is not as if there has not been significant time to sift through her record. She was at least one of the finalists for over a month.

If the right wing ever comes up with an honest objection to Sotomayor, it will be a shock. Or, more likely, nobody will notice, on the boy-who-cried-wolf principle.

Yeah, but 380% of 60 is a REALLY bad number!

Yeah, just throw the 100% reversal rate for Alito back in their face, and ask why they aren't calling for his impeachment if it's so damn important.
This just gets easier and easier as the wingnuts get more ridiculous.

Are we certain the Republican party isn't some brilliant performance art just testing the limits of the public's gullibility?

Just when I think the lies cannot get any more egregious...bam!

Seriously, I think we're witnessing the fruits of catering to the lowest common denominator for so long. Eventually, all of the intellectuals will have been put to pasture and all your left with is the empty space between John Boehner's ears.

Steve, Steve -- the right isn't looking for legitimate areas of criticism. They're just slinging any old lying mud they hope will stick.

Steve, I wish I had time to do what I'm about to suggest, but us practicing lawyers sometime have to rely on you folks-who-ain't-got-nothing-better-to-do (G).
I wonder how many (other than the 5 ruling the Supreme Court took up) of Judge Sotomayor's rulings/opinions were the subject of cert petitions that the Supreme Court denied? Since denial is, in effect, an affirmation of the lower court's ruling, it would be interesting to know that figure.

The right has no interest in pulling out any actually objectionable items (if there are any...even from their standpoint). That would be WAY too complicated and would go right over the heads for the dittoheads anyway.

The entire theory is to just throw static and noise into the process and see if there is any public reaction to any of the crap spewing out from their lying, deceitful mouths.

Its all about them getting power back....not what they can do for the country, but just getting power back. Nothing more, nothing less.

>"the limits of the public's gullibility?"

They have not forgoten the wisdom of P.T. Barnum:

"There's a sucker born every minute".

"I don't doubt there are legitimate areas of criticism regarding Sotomayor's lengthy legal career".

Really? All her opinions are out there. A bunch of research assistants could pull them and scan them in an afternoon or two for quotable quips. And its not like this is the first we have heard of her - Sotomayor's name has been on the top of the list since Souter announced his retirement.

And lets not forget it is the GOP mudslingers we are dealing with here. As of right now I am gonna say they are coming up with this weak shit because this weak shit is all they got.

Other weaknesses in the reversal rate arguments are:

1. The argument only works if you think that the Supreme Court has never reached an incorrect decision. I doubt any conservative thinks that. (See Roe v. Wade)

2. If the majority vote is all that matters, that also means that justices in the minority are "wrong." Perhaps there's a justice on the court that has always been on the "winning" side of every vote, but I doubt it.

They're just banking on the (correct) notion that most people have no sense of how our court system works. Or, it's very true that the Supreme Court has nothing better to do than grant cert to cases it thinks were decided correctly. Ditto, y'all!

I am going to go out on a limb and state that more than 50% of Supreme Court cases result in reversals because the Supreme Court is dispoportionately more likely to take a case if members think it was wrongly decided.

Second, being reversed by THIS particular court is not necessarily a badge of shame. Quite the opposite.

Third, for every case she was reversed on, at least one other member of the esteemed circuit was also wrong.

The best point made in that Rachel Maddow segment was that Sam Alito, shining light of the conservative movement, had a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT REVERSAL RATE by the Supreme Court. Yet no one, conservative or liberal, used that point to dispute his qualifications to sit on the Supreme Court.

As usual, Republicans and their media supporters are counting on a populace who does not understand context.

Then there's the empathy problem. How could a pampered Puerto Rican affirmative action diva possibly understand how a middle class white person like my sister struggled financially to put her daughter through an Ivy league school? When you're given everything, you don't understand what it is to work for something. The public sector becomes the answer to everything. Need bailouts, education, healthcare, environment...just go to Washington where money grows on trees.

An argument could be made that the 40% affirmance is more damning given the makeup of SCOTUS during Sotomayor's tenure on the cout of appeals. It was after all the court that installed Dumbya as president and look how that worked out. Rhenquist is dead, Scalia and Thomas are lost causes, but I often wonder if O'Connor and Kennedy think about their votes and what it meant for the country.

The Supreme Court reverses 85% of the cases before them. So she's pretty good. But there's concept people should know: they only take about 2% of the cases and they chose cases where they want to reverse. That the Supreme Court reverses less than 100% is actually the surprising concept. In 15% of their cases, they intended to reverse and didn't. But there was a great Onion article about this: "Supreme Court rules that the Supreme Court rules" In the Onion article, they were claiming that they were even better than Rush and Metallica. Oddly enough, I think the Onion has a better take on the Supreme Court than any media outlet or the pundits. At least the don't actually take it seriously.

And yet, conservative media personalities nevertheless continue to tout this as evidence of a Sotomayor weakness, either unaware or unconcerned about how completely wrong the argument is.

Unconcerned. The Rovian-GOP is not, and never has been concerned with the correctness of their arguments.

Then again, The Onion probably is the best source for news. Their claim of being "The World's Finest News Source" is probably real. Can any other news source claim that? Not really. Other news sources use propaganda sources, The Onion just makes shit up. Which is more accurate? When you just make shit up, sometimes you're right.

Are we certain the Republican party isn't some brilliant performance art just testing the limits of the public's gullibility?

Absolutely not. I mean, absolutely not certain.

And while we're at it, some digital cupcakes to Luther for his sadly underlauded performance art...although perhaps there's a real Luther and a handlejacking Luther parody.

Don't forget, reversal ratings also show the mentality of the Judges who do the reversing. An RR isn't like an objective measure of performance. Didn't Repubs get to plant a lot of sympathetic Judges into the system over recent years?

As for logical consistency: the righties who put up this stuff know that fact-checkers can combat the fallacious or hypocritical tropes thereof. But they're counting on low-information viewers, shoddy or anti-progressive villagers, etc. The Wurlitzer players don't care about their "intellectual reputations", only the final results.

This chiquita wouldn't have had five cases before the Supremes if she knew what she were doing. You said yourself that Alito only had two.

But go ahead and pretend that a 60 percent loser is a winner. If I hadn't kept my post-surgical patient death rate consistently several points below 50 percent, I sure wouldn't be bragging about it here.

That's the difference between lefties and people with accountability.

Hahahahahhahahahahahahahaha--hahahahahahahah. I can just see some self righteous conservative having that pointed out to them. Stupid feeling stupid...er.

pampered

Because, you know, Parish Hilton wishes she'd been raised by a Puerto Rican single mother.

affirmative action diva

Because, you know, they'll let anyone graduate cum laude from Princeton.

Your racism is showing, Luther. As is Limbaugh's.

"...This chiquita wouldn't have had five cases before the Supremes if she knew what she were doing. You said yourself that Alito only had two.

But go ahead and pretend that a 60 percent loser is a winner. If I hadn't kept my post-surgical patient death rate consistently several points below 50 percent,..."-Mike K

Proving the stupidity point with "Chiquita" reference and quoting 60% equating with 2 and 5 cases..best go back an have another beer MK to match that mind boggling logic that makes it possible to match apples with oranges. (Surgeons blogging...riight...that's the ticket)

I agree that the 60% claim is bogus. The Supreme Court doesn't take cases unless there is a decent chance that they will overturn them. But what about the cases where she has been unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court. Aren't those examples where she was just plain wrong?

Thank you, Steve, for this post.

Republicans are losing women voters by the minute
with their misrepresentation of this female Supreme Court nominee.
I work in an organization with over 500 people, mostly women,
who can no longer believe how the Republican Party is tearing this woman down.
Glenn, Rush, Newt, Sean--are you listening?
You already stirred up a hornet's nest of working women.
You could be out of power for 40 years, as Carvelle noted.
Republicans are insulting her, vilifying her, and it is totally crazy beyond belief.

But what about the cases where she has been unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court.

Which of the three overturned cases are you talking about?

Speaking of Newt Gingrich's anti-female comments--here is a gem of one:
'If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections.... Males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.'
Just sayin'

Regarding Sotomayor's criticisms, here's Samuel Alito's reversals--from Glenn Greenwald:

"Alito's reversals were treated, even though there were more of them and weightier questions:

* In a well-known 1991 case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Alito wrote a sole dissent supporting a state requirement that women inform their husbands before being permitted to obtain an abortion; the Supreme Court later rejected his view.

* In 2000, Alito ruled that Congress could not penalize state governments for failing to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act; in 2003, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote (including Chief Judge Rehnquist) rejected that conclusion and ruled that states could be penalized.

* In a 2004 death penalty case Alito decided -- Rompilla v. Horn --Alito rejected the defendant's argument that his attorneys had failed to do perform an adequate investigation to prepare for his sentencing hearing. The Supreme Court reversed Alito's decision, ruling that the defense attorney's failure to even review evidence they knew the prosecution was going to introduce at sentencing violated the Sixth Amendment.

There are numerous other instances where Alito's rulings were repudiated either by the Supreme Court or even his own Circuit. Judge for yourself if those were treated the same way as Sotomayor's more limited and less meaningful instances of reversals. Was the argument made that this proved he was inept, intellectually deficient, and chosen soley for "identity politics" in order to attract the key Italian and Catholic voting blocs?"

Which of the three overturned cases are you talking about?

Um, can they even NAME those cases?

To put it more succinctly, the bottom line is that the reversal number of cases considered is not statistically significant, so ANY judgment from it doesn't fly.

That said, she DID have a pretty big case, from when she was a district judge, reversed at appellate level. That was when she (I’m hugely simplifying, I saw it on CNN while at the bank) that liberally defined “fair use” in favor of conventional media borrowing from blogs.

Beyond that, it's quite clear she is the "safe" pick, and that she's no more liberal than OBama, whose lack of liberalism should be obvious to any non-Kool Aid drinker by now.

Putting this post together with the one above; "Feet to the Fire", can we conclude the the RWM (Right Wing Media) never learned about fact checking in their journalism courses? Is it too to learn.

There are reversals and there are reversals. If a judge is reverced for failure to understand the law, that is bad. If a judge is reversed because the Supreme Court changes the law, that is a different matter. Federal circuits often are in confliect, and SCOTUS resolves the conflict by reversing one of the circuits, even if that circuit was following binding precedent in that cicuit.