Confirmation long overdue

Friday, Aug. 7, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, much was made of the fact that she would be the first Hispanic woman to reach the nation’s highest judicial level.

In the end, though, it was her mainstream interpretation of the law and her even temperament as a federal judge that sealed her confirmation Thursday by the Senate as the 111th justice of the Supreme Court.

It is hard to ignore the fact that she grew up in a public-housing project in the South Bronx, had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, and had a father with a third-grade education who died when she was 9 years old.

The White House appropriately characterized her tough background as an American story. It was a story that added impressive chapters as she attended Princeton University and Yale Law School, became a prosecutor and corporate litigator, was appointed to a federal judgeship by President George H.W. Bush, and earned a promotion from President Bill Clinton to a seat on a federal appellate court.

Her confirmation to the nation’s highest court was both historic and long overdue. The Supreme Court has been a largely white male bastion that has not accurately reflected the makeup of the American people.

The most important quality Sotomayor brings to the court, though, is that she is eminently well qualified.

That’s what had to be grating the most to the Republican senators who voted against her. They couldn’t find any way to attack her record on the bench, so they grabbed at straws, including speeches she made outside the courtroom that didn’t sit well with them.

For all the rancor over judicial activism that Republicans made, they couldn’t help but trip over their own partisan drivel in attempting to explain their opposition to her confirmation.

Sotomayor deserved better treatment from the Republicans than she received. She will make an outstanding addition to a court sorely in need of more mainstream thinking.