North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr won’t be supporting Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, reports the AP:
The North Carolina senator says he is troubled by the judge’s decisions in cases where she “appears to have relied on something other than well-settled law” to make her decision. He says he is afraid she cannot separate her personal beliefs from the law.
He added that he believes she has clearly ignored precedent in several cases, saying he finds “little predictability in her decisions and the implications they may have.”
Kudos to Burr for taking a strong stand on this. Alas, the senior senator from our neighbor to the south, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was not so bold. In fact, he’s been downright confusing.
Graham was the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of Sotomayor, but as Jeffrey Lord writing in The American Spectator points out, his rhetoric has been all over the place:
Fleeing from principle, Graham, whose campaign website says he “never abandons his independence or strays from the conservative reform agenda,” did both.
Condescending to Sotomayor about her “wise Latina” beliefs, he also ruminated that some of the speeches she has given are “pretty disturbing,” and they “blow me away.” He wondered aloud “who are we getting” in a Justice Sotomayor, something not unlike guzzling scotch and wondering if there is a connection to perpetual hangovers. When this is followed by praise that she is “bold” and “edgy” and that “elections matter” and the president deserves “deference” and that “I desire as a Senator to find a new way to start over and get back to a Senate that’s more rational in its approach when it comes to confirmation,” Graham appears to be leading the rest of us to a disturbing conclusion.
Senator Graham is no dummy. To proceed to vote to put someone on the Court who is so obviously devoted to principles he claims to oppose gives new meaning to terms such as cowardly, lily-livered, irresolute, chickenhearted or, in Spanish, no cojones.
Indeed.