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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Sotomayor <> Miers: A Brief Rundown

I've heard this comparison enough (Dreher, Ponnuru, Buchanan on MSNBC) that I thought a quick bullet-point presentation might be in order:

  • Sotomayor is not a close friend and counsel to the President; Miers was.

  • Sotomayor has the most federal judicial experience of any Supreme Court nominee in over a century; Miers had none.

  • Most importantly, Miers suffered from a crippling ideological disconnect from the base of the President that appointed her.  Sotomayor has no such disconnect.  It was the right wing of the GOP that killed Miers.  I'm baffled that folks like Ponnuru and Buchanan seem to have blocked this out.

Daily Kos has a cute analogy game here.  Anyway, I think there's one more difference: Miers was great for the legal blogosphere.  Sitemeter was off the charts!  I predict no such boom for Sotomayor.

Posted by Matt Bodie on May 27, 2009 at 12:30 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink

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Comments

Miers wasn't Hispanic. If she were, we'd currently have her as Justice instead of Alito.

Posted by: Anon | May 28, 2009 12:13:45 PM

I agree with you, Matt. Comparing Sotomayor to Miers is not persuasive. There are reasons to oppose her nomination (temperament, judicial philosophy), but lack of qualifications is not one of them.

Posted by: David Stras | May 27, 2009 9:25:39 AM

Reiterating what I said in a comment on a different post: This type of sound-bite nonsense is what the partisans want; they do not want any sort of elevated debate about constitutional interpretation.

Posted by: Howard Wasserman | May 27, 2009 7:35:21 AM

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