Sotomayor, Dems, turn the Republicans' table

On the first day of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Republican senators uttered approximately 12,000 words in opening statements. Of these, precisely 11 made sense: "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to get confirmed," said Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's missionary of world-weary wisdom housed always so humbly in cracker-barrel folksiness.

That rhetorical sequestration conveniently stood out as the Republican soundbite to be aired by the media time and again, because, as suggested, those other 11,989 words were an audible blur of banality and base-pandering, proving only that the Beltway GOP had learned not one thing since eight months and nine days ago.

They tried their best to circle the ideological wagons and obfuscate, confuse and terrify the innocent -- as though these cartoonish little figures from Monsters Inc. had any believable terror left in them.

Frankly, it was a bit sad to see such once-mighty demagogues go so flat; but flat they were, beginning at the beginning, with ranking member Jeff Sessions, whose spooky "dangerous crossroads" opening statement sounded like a $5 séance complete with rattling plastic bones, lugubrious organ music and prerecorded apparitional hoots and hollers.

Yea, verily, whimpered Jeff, our legal system is imperiled -- imperiled, mind you; did you hear him?; imperiled -- for we stand at a perilous junction: "Down one path is the traditional American system ... where judges impartially apply the law to the facts without regard to personal views." Up the organ music.

Then, rattle those bones: "Down the other path lies a brave new world, where words have no true meaning, and judges are free to decide what facts they choose to see."

Especially guilty of this jurisprudential crime against America -- the lights are now austerely dimmed, the under-the-table knocking noises introduced -- are, of course, wise Latinas, who must be read and quoted only out of context, so their wisdom fails to emerge.

And on and on it went, all 11,989 indistinguishable words of hypocritical blather about the liberal bogeyman of "judicial activism."

Yet every time they rang that alarm bell, a spotlight was thrown -- a clarifying floodlight, actually, on the "other path" of SeSessionist hand-wringing, the one down on which "lies a brave new world" of supraconservative judicial activism, where words indeed have had "no true meaning, and judges are free to decide what facts they choose to see."

With every Republican Boo! came an illuminating flash of Scalia, a flicker of Thomas, a beam on Alito, a flare thrown on Roberts.

And the Dems were lying in uniform wait. Noted Senator Al Franken, "During the Rehnquist court, Justice Clarence Thomas voted to overturn federal laws more than Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer combined." Observed Russ Feingold, the phrase "judicial activism ... really seems to have lost all usefulness, particularly since so many rulings of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court can fairly be described as activist in their disregard for precedent and their willingness to ignore or override the intent of Congress."

Others voiced similar accuracies, but it was, I thought, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island who really slammed home yesterday's oft-cited baseball metaphors in concomitantly slamming the Republican radicals' criticism of liberal judicial activism:

"I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an umpire who merely calls balls and strikes," as Chief Justice Roberts proffered during his own confirmation hearings, recalled Whitehouse. And his choice of corroboration was exquisite: "Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that -- and this is a quote -- '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.' Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin's quote, has served the interests and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican Party? Some coincidence."

Then, immediately, a pleasantly searing recap, just in case anyone was still distracted by the radicals' smoke and mirrors: "The right-wing justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights."

Keep your eye on Whitehouse. He may be headed there someday.

Perhaps the most brilliant stroke of séance-table-turning, however, came from the object of Republicans' disaffection herself, Sonia Sotomayor, who dumped a bucket of traditional conservative "empathy" right on their heads. As "an assistant District Attorney in New York," she told the panel, "I felt the suffering of victims' families torn apart by a loved one's needless death. And I learned the tough job law enforcement has protecting the public safety."

Go ahead, boys. Try belittling that empathy for the police and victims of crime.