Republicans Call Angry Groups to Testify at Sotomayor Hearings

Cross-posted at the Francis L. Holland Blog and Now Public.

Americans for a Pluralistic US Supreme Court circulates an online petition in support of President Obama's nominee.

Yahoo News report that the Republicans are planning to bring stakeholders in their political coalition into the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, which is a way of making extreme points and offering extreme positions without elected Republic Senate members making these extreme arguments.

Republican senators will call Frank Ricci, a white firefighter who won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race discrimination last month, to testify about Sonia Sotomayor at her high court confirmation hearings next week. Yahoo News

Frank Ricci can be counted on to assert that as a white man he was discriminated against by Sotomayor and the rest of the three-judge appeals court panel that rejected the white mens' appeals for the court to confirm the results of a test that excluded all Black people from promotions. So, although the Senator Jim Sessions many not say so himself, calling on Frank Ricci is a way to send a message to white men all over the country that the Republicans still believe in and defend the white male supremacy paradigm.

In addition to Ricci, Republicans plan to call Sandy Froman, a former president of the National Rifle Association, a Fairfax, Virginia-based group that promotes gun ownership rights, and Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, a Washington-based group that opposes abortion.

Republicans will use the hearings to call their base together and satisfy their base that they have done what was possible (nothing but blather on) against the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor.

Unfortunately for the Republicans this pre-staged constituency versus constituency ploy will reaffirm that the Republican Party is the party intended for white men (30% of the electorate) and virulently anti-abortion people as well as gun-rights groups. It's also the party whose most vocal constituent groups OPPOSE the nomination of the first Latina for the US Supreme Court.

With more Latinos naturalizing and being born in the United States with the right to eventually vote, the Republicans just can't help themselves. They're damned with the angry color-aroused white firefighters if they don't oppose this nomination and they're damned with the USA's fastest-growing minority if they do oppose Sotomayor. So, they'll do what they always do: Go with their color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior and oppose Sotomayor simply because she's a Democrat (the party with all those Black and Latino people) and they will oppose her because she, herself, is a Latina.

As demographics face fundamentally color-aroused dispositions, the Republican are damned if they do and damned if they don't.