Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Congratulations to Sonia Sotomayor for being confirmed by the Senate as the next U.S. Supreme Court justice Thursday by a vote of 68-31. I think she will be an excellent justice and wish her many healthy, happy years on the court. I have long supported her nomination by President Obama as a choice of moderation instead of ideology, but apparently many Republican senators have chosen to oppose her anyway. Which makes me (and some in the media I've heard) wonder why the President shouldn't just go ahead and make any future Supreme Court nominations primarily based on ideology.

If Obama were to be able to nominate another justice (or more), his best opportunity to pick someone with his ideological bent would be sometime during the next year. After all, the U.S. Senate currently has 60 Democrats in it (although Nebraska's Ben Nelson is often a Democrat in name only) and the 2010 elections may reduce their number to a level that couldn't defeat potential Republican judicial filibusters. But then again, Democratic senators running for reelection in 2010 may not want to be saddled with having to vote for a nominee on the far left with the political fallout that this could portend for them.

But sometimes you have to just do what you think is right and let the (political) chips fall where they may.

When John Roberts was nominated by President Bush to replace William Rehnquist as Chief Justice, this represented no essential ideological shift on the court, as both justices had a conservative judicial ideology. When Samuel Alito was picked to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, though, the pick represented a substantial shift in the court to the right. This explains why about half of the Senate Democrats voted in favor of Roberts while only four of them voted for Alito. Since Souter's replacement with Sotomayor would, as was the case with Roberts, represent no substantial change in the Supreme Court's ideological makeup, one might have thought that the GOP would have taken this opportunity to show how reasonable they were. But since (in my opinion) they blew it (only nine out of forty Republican senators voted for her), who knows what they'll get next time around!

One side note: it was gratifying to see Senator Al Franken presiding over the final debate and voting. Since the duty of presiding over the Senate generally falls to junior senators in the majority party and Franken is the junior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, having him up there made very good sense. I think he did an impressive job.