Of Note

Under the Senate Judiciary Committee as run by Patrick Leahy, even plans on which the two parties have previously agreed to collaborate disintegrate into partisanship. Witness his effort to expand the federal judiciary now that President Obama can pick the new judges.

The original version of the Federal Judgeship Act, proposed in March 2008 and co-sponsored by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, was supposed to give both parties a say in the composition of an expanded federal judiciary. Then the election results would determine which party's President got to nominate the judges. The idea was to pass a plan and then have it go into effect after the inauguration of the election winner in 2008. It had bipartisan support.

Today the Hispanic Leadership Fund issued the following statement by its President, Mario H. Lopez, regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano:

The Ricci case is a prime example of how working families are negatively impacted when judges reply on their personal preferences instead of strictly following the law. Hispanics, like all Americans, understand that replacing equality of opportunity with equality of results is not a recipe for justice. Today, the hard working Hispanic and white firefighters who passed their exam finally received true empathy—that which comes from being on the right side of the law.

Judge Sotomayor's nomination to the United States Supreme Court has generated a healthy debate over the role of judges. Some fuel was recently added to the fire when it was discovered that the White House sent Republican U.S. Senators a memo making the case that Sotomayor is a "[a] nonideological and restrained judge." According to the White House, Sotomayor rejects liberal judicial activism and the injection of personal views and experiences from the bench because she "wrote expressly about the importance of judicial restraint" during the confirmation process for her Second Circuit nomination.