Obama seeks to quell Sotomayor dust-up

After his spokesman said that Sotomayor had acknowledged a "poor" choice of words, Obama said yesterday that Sotomayor "would have restated" her comment. "She was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through [and] that will make her a good judge," the president said in an interview with NBC News.

"Part of the job of a justice on the Supreme Court, or any judge, is to be able to stand in somebody else's shoes, to be able to, you know, understand the nature of the case, and how it has an impact on people's ordinary day-to-day lives," he added.

The remark at issue was made during a speech at the University of California at Berkeley in which Sotomayor said "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging." "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said.

Some Republicans and conservatives have seized on the remark to question Sotomayor's fairness and fitness for the high court. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called her a "Latina woman racist," and demanded she withdraw her nomination.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has echoed such characterizations while railing against Obama's first pick for the high court. Yesterday on his radio show, Limbaugh said Sotomayor "brings a form of bigotry or racism to the court" and compared nominating her to nominating David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, who was elected to the state legislature in Louisiana but was rejected by many Republicans.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called Limbaugh's comment "offensive."

Some other Republicans and conservatives are trying to dial back the criticisms.

Yesterday on former Education Secretary Bill Bennett's radio show, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele urged his party to stop "slammin' " Sotomayor.

"I'm excited that a Hispanic woman is in this position," he said, warning that attacks on her ethnicity will get Republicans "painted as a party that's against the first Hispanic woman" who would be on the Supreme Court.

Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, which is running web videos against Sotomayor, agreed that too much is being made of her ethnic background. "Somehow, this important debate is turning into an argument about race and identity politics," she wrote yesterday on National Review's website.

"We need to move forward with a confirmation process that focuses on what really matters," added Long, who herself had criticized Sotomayor's Latina comment. "Does Judge Sotomayor embrace a view of judging that is constrained by the text, history, and principles of the Constitution and our laws? Or does she favor an interpretive enterprise in which a judge's personal feelings, views, background, and politics drive the outcome of cases?"

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said on National Public Radio on Thursday that the name-calling is "terrible." "This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent," he said.

But her judicial philosophy - and whether she believes judges make policy from the bench, as she suggested in a 2005 speech - is fair game, Cornyn said. "Do they see their role as another branch of the legislature, but one that happens not to stand for election - and a license, really, to impose their personal views and agenda on the American people, under the guise of interpreting the law and the Constitution?" he asked.

Meanwhile, a second national poll showed support for Sotomayor. A Quinnipiac University survey released yesterday found that 54 percent of voters approve of her nomination, while 24 percent are opposed and 22 percent are undecided.