Sonia Sotomayor - what nobody said

Sonia Sotomayor is now a Justice of the Supreme Court. It was disheartening to see how she was vilified by the right for being, by all serious accounts, a center of the road and moderate jurist. When John Roberts deflected probing questions during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee he was praised for displaying a 'judicial temperament'; Sotomayor was criticized for being secretive and dismissive. What really got me, though, was the way they rolled out the fireman from New Haven, Ricci, like he was a smoking gun. First of all, no matter how you feel about the issue, the entire Supreme Court overruled by a scant 5-4 so there seems to be plenty of play in both the issues and the underpinning of the law.

What about the Chief Justice John Roberts, does he legislate from the bench, you bet he does. As Jeffery Toobin noted in the 'New Yorker', "After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."