Last night, President Obama called all three of the women we last mentioned as potential Supreme Court Justices and told them he had chosen the very first on our list, 55-year-old New York judge Sonia Sotomayor — despite a whisper campaign that had already questioned her intelligence and called her a “fiery Latina” instead of the more respectful “potential first Hispanic Justice.” Sotomayor has more combined experience at every level of the judicial system, than any current member of the Court:

• The Associated Press starts with Sotomayor’s compelling biography: “Sonia Sotomayor’s path to the pinnacle of the legal profession began in the 1960s at a Bronx housing project just a couple blocks from Yankee Stadium, where she and her family dealt with one struggle after another.”
• In its May 15 profile, the New York Times calls her “Baseball’s Savior” for her role in ending the 1994 baseball strike. The Times also noted that she runs what lawyers call a “hot bench,” demanding of attorneys that appear before her bench at the Court of Appeals: “questions come fast and furious and lawyers have to be fully prepared.”
• About that whisper campaign, which is likely to continue (as with all nominees): It began early with a much-discussed piece in the New Republic, which quoted comments from a judicial handbook and anonymous law clerks and questioned her intelligence and painted her as domineering, even though writer Jeffrey Rosen admitted that “I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths.”

American University law professor Darren Hutchison analyzes the written comments critics refer to in criticizing Sotomayor, and notes that “domineering” is not language normally used about male justices such as Antonin Scalia:

For Sotomayor, being a sharp interrogator and requiring lawyers to be “on top of it” are negative qualities. These traits are not negative in most men, certainly not white men… In Scalia, toughness is positive; in Sotomayor, it is nonjudicial. If Scalia asks irrelevant questions, he is just being a dutiful “law professor” trying to hold the attention of his class. If Sotomayor does the same thing, she is just interested in hearing herself talk. When Scalia duels harshly with litigants, the “spectators” watch in amazement. If Sotomayor asks tough questions, she is seen as difficult, temperamental, and excitable. The disparate treatment is too dense to deny.

As I said when I posted this on WVFC, we’ve been rooting for every woman on the shortlist. But I’ll be keeping extra-close watch on the cable-TV noise if they try to pull the “too aggressive” or “fiery Latina” or “affirmative action” card and try to stop her confirmation. And now it’s time to call my oldest friend, who first taught me that one doesn’t mess with brilliant kick-ass Puerto Rican girls.