Elections have consequences

Elections have consequences. Judge Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first Hispanic Justice of the US Supreme Court. There’s no mystery or suspense to that statement, and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop it, short of Judge Sotomayor withdrawing her nomination. Let’s assume that’s unlikely. What I don’t understand is why any Republicans are bothering to put up such an ugly fight. She’s eminently qualified, unlike Harriet Miers, who stands with G. Harold Carswell as one of the most laughable nominations in the history of the court. Judge Sotomayor is a classic American success story, working her way up from difficult beginnings in the Bronx to Yale Law School, the Federal Appellate Bench, and now the lifetime appointment above all lifetime appointments.

I frankly don’t understand the logic of opposing her with the ferocity we're starting to see already. To begin with, it’s pointless. There’s not a damn thing that Senate Republicans can do to hold up the nomination, since thanks to November’s electoral landslide, they don’t have the numbers. In fact, they’ll have a tough time even stopping debate. I'm bad at math and even I can figure it out. Secondly, getting too overanxious could backfire badly with the Hispanic community. Alienating another constituency isn’t a good idea when they desperately need to find someone willing to vote for their candidates in 2010. Pissing off Hispanics won't help win Florida. And third, President Obama is himself a constitutional scholar. After eight years of a man who can't spell constitution without his vice president's help, complaining about Judge Sotomayor represents the height of hypocrisy.

My take is that the reality is finally settling in with Chairman Limbaugh and the endangered, intellectually challenged base of the GOP who appear not to hear the big red clue phone ringing. Their ticket was laughed off the map in November’s election, and their numbers dwindled to near-irrelevant levels on both sides of Capitol Hill. To make matters worse, a senior Republican Senator decided he’d had enough and jumped off the sinking ship, preferring to get picked up by an enemy lifeboat. Now, when the maddeningly popular, embarrassingly eloquent and uncommonly effective President nominates a perfectly good candidate for the Supreme Court, even though saying “let’s live to fight another day” is the logical course of action, the right-wing spin cycle deems her to be unworthy, using epithets such as “America deserves better” and “racist” (that’s from both Chairman Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich). Being politically impotent seems not to be good enough. Now, they’re revealing themselves to be utterly tone deaf as well. We’ll see this play a couple more times over the next four years, and each one will have a different main character, but the same ending: a qualified candidate for the Supreme Court is nominated, gets vilified by the loony right, is called nasty names, then receives easy confirmation and ascends the marble steps to be seated on the Court.

So if yelling and screaming like a petulant toddler will be a futile endeavor from the start, why bother wasting the hot air? Face it, conservatives, you lost. Elections have consequences.