Process to confirm Sotomayor likely won't be about race

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is a proud and accomplished Latina. This fact apparently drives some prominent Republicans to a state resembling incoherent, sputtering rage.

"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ranted Wednesday on Twitter. My first reaction was that politicians above a certain age should never be left alone in the danger-strewn landscape of social networking. My second thought was: Whoa, Newt, what's that about?

Rush Limbaugh also — predictably — bellowed endlessly about how Sotomayor was a "reverse racist," and how Obama was one too. But unlike Gingrich, Limbaugh doesn't ask to be taken seriously. He just asks to be paid.

Gingrich's outburst was in reaction to a widely publicized, out-of-context quote from a 2001 speech in which Sotomayor mused about how her identity might or might not affect her decisions as a federal judge. Far from being some kind of "racist" screed, the speech was actually a meditation on Sotomayor's personal experience of a universal truth: Who we are inevitably influences what we do.

Each of us carries through life a unique set of experiences. Sotomayor's happen to be the experiences of a brilliant, high-powered Latina — a Nuyorican who was raised in the projects of the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, edited the Yale Law Journal, worked as a Manhattan prosecutor and a corporate lawyer, and served for 17 years as a federal trial and appellate judge.

Given that kind of sterling resume — and given that she has, according to presidential adviser David Axelrod, more experience on the federal bench than any Supreme Court nominee in at least 100 years — it's understandable that Republican critics would have to grasp at straws.

The charge that she's a "judicial activist" finds no basis in her voluminous record. Critics have seized on a ruling she joined in a case called Ricci v. DeStefano, involving a reverse-discrimination claim by a group of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn. But Sotomayor's action in that case is more properly seen as an example of judicial restraint.