To be perfectly honest, I’m glad to see Republicans backtracking from their attacks on Sonia Sotomayor. No, I don’t think she possesses the right temperament or restraint for the Supreme Court, but I don’t think we could have gotten a much better candidate than the one Obama gave us. Think of the right’s restraint as not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Sotomayor’s status as a wildcard leaves open the possibility of the Left having found their David Souter. Yes, her lack of a position on life issues is almost hard to believe, and her position on the Second Amendment is absurd, but the conservatives who have spent the most time with her seem to be the least concerned. She’s also scaring a good deal of people on the left, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Hypothetically, let’s assume worst-case scenario and say that we are actually certain of her positions on various issues and they’re worse than previously thought, we must still ask ourselves this: are we going to get anyone better? A Democratic President with a large majority in the Senate means that we could very well be debating how best to ‘bork’ another Ginsburg or Stevens. Instead, he picked someone who could fall anywhere between those two bastions of liberal judicial philosophy and a moderate swing position.

Obama’s other current nominees certainly fit the liberal mold, leaving one almost surprised that the first opening on the nation’s highest court was not a more sure-fire activist. Republicans in Congress still seem lost in the wilderness on any given day and Dem leadership that just recently took over the majority would have been looking to get behind a large and sweeping change. All of that considered, we’ve been given a wildcard to replace a liberal seat – we couldn’t have realistically hoped for much more.

There is value in fighting the nomination on principle, demanding a more strict, originalism-believing jurist. However, the tradeoff of practicality for principle in this case is quite high. In their opposition to Sotomayor, Republican officials and media personalities have called her a racist, denigrated one of the largest Hispanic political apparatuses in the nation and, honestly, looked impotent. If we have zero expectation of actually overturning the nomination, and every one that follows until we get another Scalia, then we ought to get out of the way, herald the greatness of a Latina justice on the Court and get her in before the President reconsiders his selection.

Last 5 posts by Gideon D'Assandro

• The Reality of Racial Politics - August 17th, 2009
• Thank God Obama's President - August 3rd, 2009
• Health Care Coverup - July 23rd, 2009
• The Suppressed EPA Report’s Effect on Healthcare - July 12th, 2009
• Social Conservatism Going Forward - July 5th, 2009