Sotomayor Wins Overwhelming Democratic Support from Senate Judiciary Committee

The Washington Post reports that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the US Supreme Court received overwhelming support from Democrats and one Republican on the US Senate Judiciary Committee today, setting the stage for a vote in the full Senate:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday voted almost along party lines to forward the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the full Senate, clearing a path for her probable confirmation as the Supreme Court's first Hispanic justice.

The 13 to 6 vote just before noon came almost two weeks after the committee's members grilled Sotomayor for 2 1/2 days, eliciting answers that betrayed little indication of how the nominee, an appellate judge for the past 11 years, would rule on the most significant issues to come before the court.

Sotomayor is President Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court and, in addition to being its first Latina, would become the court's third female member. In choosing her in May, Obama emphasized her life story, rising from a poor childhood with a widowed mother in a Bronx housing project to attend two Ivy League universities, eventually becoming a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said the full Senate probably will not begin debate on Sotomayor's confirmation until next week. WaPost

According to Dan Balz of the Washington Post,

GOP strategist Alex Castellanos said he thinks there will be no backlash among Hispanics over this vote. He said it is "insulting that Hispanics would believe a Hispanic nominee must be approved solely because of her ethnicity and not on the merits of her achievements, impartiality and judicial philosophy." WaPost

Alex Castellanos is dead wrong. For Latinos, voting against the clearly qualified Sotomayor will be like voting against the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday was for Blacks. It will be taken and a color and ethnicity-aroused slap in the face and it will show that, as between joining political forces with Blacks and Democrats or Republicans, the Republican Party is simply out of the question.

Republicans couldn't find any smoking gun evidence, or evidence of any sort, that would disqualify Sotomayor, so they voted against her because she was nominated by a Democrat, she was nominated by a Black President, and she is Latino. That combination of color and ethnicity-aroused ideation, emotion and voting behavior will doom Republicans and Blacks and Latinos as well as women and well-meaning white men assert greater group strength at the polls, forming an unbeatable majority.

The Republicans are writing their own obituary with their opposition to judge Sonia Sotomayor.