Sonia Sotomayor (say so-toe-my-YORE) would not be the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court.
To take nothing away from the justifiable pride that Hispanics feel in the nomination of the child of Puerto Rican immigrant parents who grew up in a South Bronx housing project and was a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, that distinction probably belongs to Justice Benjamin Cardozo.
But therein lies a tale.
Cardozo, as Eugene Volokh and others point out, was the descendant of Portuguese Jews who immigrated to America, and when he was nominated by President Hoover in 1932 he was considered a Jew and not an Hispanic.
In fact, Cardozo filled what came to be known as the High Court’s “Jewish seat” and was succeeded by three other Jewish justices.
Being an Hispanic was a vague thing in those days, and while Jews, Italians and the Irish, among others, had identifiable voting blocs and political power in their own right, Hispanics were very few and very far between.
Hispanics were defined in Cardozo’s time as people from ancient Hispania, or the Iberian Peninsula, but today are considered the people of countries formerly ruled by Spain, including Mexico and most of Central and South America.
As well as the fastest-growing ethnic voting bloc in the U.S. and responsible for an extraordinary political realignment. This is because many Hispanics, conservative by inclination and religion, drifted into the arms of the Democratic Party and went for Barack Obama over John McCain by a 2-1 margin in 2008 as the Republican Party (although not McCain himself) embraced an anti-immigrant nativism that has helped define its xenophobic tack to the right.
All that so noted, the Census Bureau does not consider Portuguese Americans to be Hispanic, although some other federal agencies do.
It matters not, because in the end ethnicity is substantially what you consider yourself to be. What Sotomayor is doesn’t matter; what she brings to the court and the legacy she fashions will.
The vultures were circling overhead within nanoseconds of the announcement that Sotomayor was President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.
Some thoughts beyond her ethnicity:
* She more than passes muster as a replacement for David Souter and is a brilliant pick politically, and no more so than when the Party of Southern White Men tries to go after her since most voters are no longer susceptible to the GOP’s brand of dog-whistle politics.
* Oh, it was a president from that party who nominated her to the federal district bench and 25 of its senators, including seven who are still sitting, who voted to elevate her to the federal appeals court.
* To call her a judicial activist, let alone a far leftist, as conservatives are, is downright hilarious in the era of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.
* Although the comparison is being made, she is not a stupido like Harriet Miers. Stupidos do not graduate from Princeton and Yale Law at the top of their classes.
* Opponents pigeonhole her at their own risk. She has ruled against a pro-life group and the oft-quoted “wise Latina” passage from another opinion is out of context.
* John Yoo, who willfully ignored the law in justifying the use of torture, says she won’t adhere to it.
* While the High Court makes the man . . . er, woman in many cases, there is unlikely to be a shift in the balance of power once she puts on the black bathrobe and gets her feet on the ground.
* The Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. She will be confirmed, but only after much breast beating and all-around wingnuttery.
Shaun Mullen is a former The Moderate Voice columnist. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. He blogs at Kiko’s House.