Sotomayor left out information from questionnaire

When presidential appointments need confirmation, the candidates complete questionnaires to allow Senators the opportunity to review their record.  Some information simply cannot be complete, such as speaking engagements over one’s career and the transcripts of all their remarks, but it should include all of their published opinions.  Wendy Long notices an interesting omission from Sonia Sotomayor’s questionnaire, and it relates to her inflammatory “wise Latina” remark:

This morning, I sent a letter to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee members, noting that Judge Sotomayor’s responses and documentary production in her Supreme Court nomination questionnaire are incomplete.

The omission noted concerns a memo that Sotomayor signed as a member of a three-person task force of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, in which she objects to the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York state, on the basis, among other things, of her contention that “Capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society.”  The entire memo is worth reading.

One of two possibilities explains this omission: Either this is another Tom Daschle-type vetting failure, or the White House wants to rush this nomination through to avoid such documents coming to light.

CNS News also reports on this today, noting that the letter dates back to 1981 and giving a few highlights:

• “Capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society.”
• “The problem of crime and violence in American society is so complex, it is unreasonable to think that capital punishment will result in preventing it or diminishing it.”
• –“Our present perspective on the meaning of our values in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the state of humanistic thinking in the world judge capital punishment as a violation of those values.”
• “In the review of the current literature of the past two years, no publications have been found that challenge the evidence and the rationale presented in opposition to the death penalty.”

I don’t support the death penalty, either, but these accusations are way over the top.  While I don’t support it, I know that there are rational, legitimate arguments for a death penalty that don’t even come close to racism.  The Judeo-Christian tradition most certainly includes the death penalty for a narrow range of offenses, despite the “humanistic thinking” of the world, and does not violate those traditions at all — and arguing that it does is absurd. The rational argument against executions are better focused on effectiveness and the disturbing number of later discoveries of innocence among Death Row prisoners, and the very clearly imbalanced distribution of death sentences among the population of murderers as a matter of practice.

Finally, I love any paper that makes a categorical statement that its own argument is so good that no one has offered a rebuttal.  Of course there were publications rebutting this argument, probably a whole library of them, which is one of the reasons we still have the death penalty on federal and state levels.  This assertion has all the hallmarks of an arrogance that one could only find in youth or Academia.

And, actually, Sotomayor was close enough to both in 1981, when she signed this document.  It’s not quite the same thing as dredging up a college thesis, since she had been a member of the bar at the time — but only for a year.  It’s a legitimate avenue of questioning, and Sotomayor should have included it in her questionnaire.  However, it’s also 28 years old, and the Senate has over 400 opinions authored by Sotomayor that will have more relevance.  It will probably come up, but I doubt anyone will dwell on it.

This, though, might come up:

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor once told a group of minority lawyers that she believed a delay in her confirmation as a federal appeals judge a decade ago was driven partly by Republican lawmakers’ ethnic stereotypes of her, suggesting that the tensions surrounding her current nomination are hardly new to the New York jurist.

“I was dealt with on the basis of stereotypes . . . and it was painful . . . and not based on my record,” she told the lawyers in New York in 1998. “I got a label because I was Hispanic and a woman and [therefore] I had to be liberal.”

Some of those same Republicans are in the Senate and on the Judiciary Committee now, and I suspect they’ll relish the opportunity to challenge that statement and demand that she call them bigots to their faces.  I suspect that she will have a walkback already planned, but it will make for interesting viewing.

Update: Think Progress argues that Sotomayor didn’t fail to disclose the memo, but their argument runs a little aground when they admit that Sotomayor didn’t provide it:

Although the internal memorandum is not specifically disclosed in Sotomayor’s questionnaire, Sotomayor did disclose, and provide senators with multiple copies of a 1981 letter she drafted on behalf of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. That letter states that “capital punishment represents ongoing racism in our society,” a virtually identical statement to the one Long accuses Sotomayor of hiding. Sotomayor’s 1981 letter can be viewed at the Senate Judicary Committee’s website.

Six of one, half-dozen of the other, appears to be TP’s argument, and they’re probably correct, but it’s probably going to be little more than a minor point in the hearings anyway.