Ilya Somin, who is scheduled to testify against the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, restates a position he and I have held consistently about Senatorial deference to a President's judicial nominees:

The bottom line is that Supreme Court justices wield great influence and serve for life. It is dangerous to give any one man unconstrained power to choose them. It is almost equally dangerous to give him unconstrained power to appoint anyone with appropriate professional qualifications, since the president can almost always find a technically qualified nominee who will reflect his views - even if those views may be seriously flawed or show excessive deference to the executive. The current confirmation process has many flaws. But one that gives the President largely unconstrained authority to pick justices would be worse.

I've presented this exact argument many many times. Now, where are the Nuclear Option proponents (when Bush was President) to rebut this argument today? Listen to the crickets.

Speaking for me only

Specter is up. I can't follow it right now. Please do so in the comments.

Update: I saw Specter's riff on judicial legislation and the ridiculous "proportionality and congruence" standard the Court invented for determining whether the Congress was acting within its Commerce Clause power. Best thing in the questioning I have seen.

Update (TL): The transcript from this morning (part 1)is available here. Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here and Part 4 is here.

More . . .

Ian Milheiser has the details about the support given by GOP Senators Sessions, Hatch and McCain to the extreme Right Wing group Committee for Justice, which is running an ad accusing Puerto Rican judges Jose Cabranes and Sonia Sotomayor of cavorting with terrorists:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member of the Judiciary Committee, was a featured guest at a Georgetown fundraiser for the Committee for Justice in 2003. According to the New York Times, the event raised at least $50,000 for the right-wing group that is responsible for the recent Sotomayor slime piece. . . . The right-wing group also has other ties to GOP Senators. CFJ’s Chairman of the Board worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign as a “Director of Conservative Outreach.” . . . Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) defended CFJ and its [2003 ad attacking Senator Leahy as "anti-Catholic" (ironically, Leahy is Catholic)] on the Senate floor:

There has been an awful lot of railing about this ad by the Committee for Justice. . . . I say it is legitimate commentary.

Are Sessions, Hatch, and their conservative colleagues still willing to defend the Committee for Justice and argue that it is “legitimate commentary” to imply Sotomayor [and Cabranes] [are] terrorist[s]?

Speaking for me only

Hillary Clinton is slated to give a "major speech" today. I have no idea what it is about or where it will be given. Just heard Andrea Mitchell say that.

The Tour de France has been uneventful the past 2 days. Big days in the Alps lie ahead.

President Obama seems to be putting his shoulder to the wheel on health care. Senator Dodd's Health Committee pushed out a bill with mandates (employer and individual). Max Baucus' committee has yet to be heard from.

While actual legal issues and judicial philosophy have not really been a part of the Sotmayor hearings, particularly with regard to the Ricci case, it is still worth noting the actual facts and law of that case. The National Women''s Law Center provides a good post on the matter.

This is an Open Thread.

We have learned that Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) has a favorite Puerto Rican jurist -- Jose Cabranes. Sessions demanded to know why Judge Sotomayor did not follow Judge Cabranes' lead:

Interestingly, Sessions was very critical of Judge Sotomayor's involvement, as a member of the Board of Directors, of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sessions seemed not to know that his favorite Boricua judge, Cabranes, was also a member of the Board of the PRDLEF. Now right wing groups allied with Sessions and following his lead are running an ad attacking Sotomayor as a "terrorist:"

Senator Whitehouse should provide something of interest.

Apparently, being boring and uninteresting is the Dem strategy today. So I am going to return to the politics of the Sotomayor hearings. Matt Yglesias writes:

Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We’re talking about a guy who’s too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it’s not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.

(Emphasis supplied.) It is certainly possible that in the South and in places like Utah and Idaho, the GOP can get 95% of the whote vote. But that will not provide the GOP any political benefit. I'll explain on the flip.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) hired the respected Center Right law professor Orin Kerr to advise him on the Sotomayor nomination. Money well spent apparently. For Cornyn has devised the novel approach of asking about Judge Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remarks. How imaginative and unusual. And of course, the need to remind that Sotomayor is a Latina was obvious. It was surely overlooked by the GOP white male Southern base. Did Rush Limbaugh forget to mention that I wonder.

My gawd. The GOP really wants to lose every Latino vote in the next election. Losing 3 out of 4 is not enough for them apparently.

When something of interest happens, I will add to this post.

I've never fully trusted generic drugs. I know they are supposed to be the same as the real deal, but there are some that just don't seem the same to me.

In the wake of Michael Jackson's death, comes this news about diprivan, a generic form of propofol, one of the drugs he may have taken:

Two tainted lots of a generic version of a drug reportedly taken by Michael Jackson have been recalled by the drug maker.... The CDC issued a health advisory Monday, saying two lots of a generic version of the drug had tested positive for endotoxin, a contaminant. The drug maker, Teva Pharmaceuticals, voluntarily recalled the lots.

Srinivasan said the agency received 40 reports of patients around the country developing high fevers and muscle aches after being injected with the drug.

So if someone famous hadn't died while taking the drug, would we ever have found out and would there have been a recall? (Note, the article says no link has been established between Jackson's death and the tainted drug. But that's not my point.) Have there been other instances of generic drugs being tainted or recalled? [More...]

Via Atrios, Craig Crawford describes the political disaster that the GOP has decided to perpetrate upon itself:

Watching Lindsey Graham's gotcha grin as he needled Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with disingenuous and rhetorical questions you had to wonder what was so funny. Does the Republican senator think it is amusing that he and his party's condescending tone toward the Hispanic woman was costing them ethnic votes with each passing hour of Tuesday's Judiciary Committee hearing?

. . . Even if they vote for her, the fallout for Republicans could reach well beyond Hispanic voters. They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.

The only thing that can make it worse for the GOP will be, as I noted earlier, if no Republicans vote for Sotomayor's confirmation. Here's hoping.

Speaking for me only

I finally decided to get an Amazon Kindle which arrived today. I think I'm going to like it (so far I've read the manual.) One thing that is very cool is if you buy it through your Amazon account, it comes pre-registered with your account information and not only don't you don't have to register it, the free wireless is already on it so you can immediately scroll the store for books and download them.

It has more bells and whistles than I'll probably use, but it's quite legible and fast. Also, you can read the first chapter of any book for free before you buy.

If you'd like to check out the Kindle, here's the link:

Since I'll most likely be looking for a good fiction book to download tonight, here's an open thread for you, all topics welcome.

Three House Committees worked together to draft a health care reform bill. The bill was release today. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post says it looks good.

For those that want to read the documents directly, the full bill is here. Fact sheets and summary documents are here.

I think I'll just keep reading Ezra.

It turns out the classified CIA program that Leon Pannetta disclosed last week which had been ordered kept from Congress by Dick Cheney had to do with hit squads on al-Qaida.

Today's news is the House is laying groundwork for hearings.

The House Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to provide documents about the now-canceled program to kill al-Qaida leaders, congressional officials said Tuesday. The agency spent at least $1 million on the eight-year program before it was terminated last month, one congressional official said. Intelligence officials say the operation never progressed beyond a planning stage.

The C.I.A. says it will cooperate with the House. [More...]