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The Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor Thursday as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. The vote was 68-31 for Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first high court nominee. She becomes the 111th justice and just the third woman to serve.

Democrats praised the 55-year-old Sotomayor as a mainstream moderate. But most Republicans voted against her, saying she’d bring personal bias and a liberal agenda to the bench.

Senators took the rare step of assembling at their desks on the Senate floor for the historic occasion, rising from their seats to cast their votes.

She replaces retiring Justice David Souter, a liberal named by a Republican president, and she is not expected to alter the court’s ideological split.

Still, Republicans and Democrats were deeply at odds over confirming Sotomayor, and the battle over her nomination highlighted profound philosophical disagreements that will shape future battles over the court’s makeup as Obama looks to another likely vacancy — perhaps more than one_ while he’s in the White House.

The GOP decried Obama’s call for “empathy” in a justice, painting Sotomayor as the embodiment of an inappropriate standard that would let a judge bring her personal whims and prejudices to the bench.

Her writings and speeches “reflect a belief not just that impartiality is not possible, but that it’s not even worth the effort,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader. “In Judge Sotomayor’s court, groups that didn’t make the cut of preferred groups often found that they ended up on the short end of the empathy standard.”

Tags: Senate, Sotomayor, Supreme Court
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  • http://www.blackplanet.com/VivvaLAshoe/ VivvaLAshoe

    I think this is great!

  • http://www.blackplanet.com/Monte_Brown/ Monte_Brown

    The Republicans wanted another Scalia or an Alito or a Roberts. They wanted reactionaries on the bench. They were hoping to reverse Roe v. Wade. I wish the three ghosts will hurry up and visit Clarence Thomas too and let Thomas know how often they were discriminated against in the workforce by being denied a promotion because of some flawed standardized test. Thank goodness Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed. She stands for Justice. She was raised by a good mother. My mom taught me empathy too. “Don’t judge someone until you can walk a mile in their shoes,” she would say. God Bless America. This is truly a great day.

  • http://www.blackplanet.com/shindogg/ shindogg

    fuuuuck u soda-mayor! i dint want no stupid mexican bich on no court bench. go hav a heart attack an die ya piece a shyit! i bet obama pick her jus cuz he wanna b nice ta “otha minorityz”. ‘latina’ sound like a spicy dish id throw up tryin ta eat. aint shyit wise bout dis ho. i wuda ben wise ta pick sumbody else ovah her lame a’ss. america will fall ta shyit cuzza ppl like her. trust me, america wuda ben a betta place if it wuz jus blacks and whites. 2 much damn confusion. “r u chinese?” “no, y ya say dat? im ” “how da fuc wud i kno?! all yall look da same” all hispanic ppl look purdy much da same. at least when ppl talk shyit bout black ppl, we kno we came from da western coast of africa. no blacks from south africa or da sahara or east coast of africa came ovah 400 or so years ago. least datz not wut history says. now if shyit wuz left out or made up, datz a damn shame aint it. but yeah, go ta hell sone-ee-uh. her stupid parents cudnt even spell “SONYA”. prolly goddamn immigrants like da resta dem hispanics comin here illegally. 2 bad if life shyitty down dere. dont blame us americans an make our lives shyitty 2 ya fukwits!

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