Sotomayor’s unexpectedly tough hearings

Steve Sailer writes at his blog:

You have to feel a little sorry for Sonia Sotomayor. Here she’s spent all these years giving speeches about what she believes to boring little Diversity colloquia. And now she finally gets on the big stage … and her P.R. handlers tell her she has to dissemble about everything closest to her heart, that if the public knew what she really stood for she might not get ultimate power. (“Trust us, Sonia, it worked for Obama, didn’t it?”)

And, then, some Republicans, surprisingly, grow a bit of a spine and make her repudiate all her best zinger lines … over and over and over.

It had to have been humiliating for her….

Sailer also urges independence for Puerto Rico, as it is a drain on us, and, if it’s not made independent, will ultimately become a state. He wonders why the U.S. chose to possess Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American war of 1898. What I’ve always wondered is why the U.S. gave Puerto Ricans, a mostly nonwhite people, U.S. citizenship in 1917. This was, after all, during the period when race consciousness was all the rage. Yes, the Democrats were in power at the time, but they were race-conscious too. As a result of Congress’ race-unconscious decision in 1917, we are now about to have as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.a Puerto Rican / “Latina” racialist whose deepest belief is that Hispanics have a “right” to proportional numbers in every profession whether they are qualified or not. - end of initial entry -

Prakhar G. writes:

You wrote:

“As a result of Congress’ race-unconscious decision in 1917, we are now about to have as a U.S. Supreme Court justice a Puerto Rican / “Latina” racialist whose deepest belief is that Hispanics have a “right” to proportional numbers in every profession whether they are qualified or not.”

So, Obama et al. could not have found a “‘Latina’ racialist whose deepest belief is that Hispanics have a “right” to proportional numbers in every profession whether they are qualified or not” without a little territory on the south to help out? Please. [LA replies: I knew someone would say what you just said. You missed my point. Obviously without Puerto Rico we would still have the Hispanic/multicultural disaster. My point was simply that we would not have had Sotomayor. A half century before Sixties liberalism the Congress made the catastrophic mistake of granting U.S. citizenship to the entire, non-English speaking population of Puerto Rico. Now a daughter of Puerto Ricans is nominated to become the first Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court justice, and, lo and behold, she’s a Hispanic racialist and diversity queen. I was showing the connection between the giving of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans 90 years ago, and what we are dealing with today.]

As for the rest:

Feeling sorry for SS: I doubt she has a problem with the hearings. Liberals, especially those in the public light, delude others and themselves on an hourly basis. This is probably just business as usual and I have little doubt that she will forget these hearings once she is safely in the SC and the members of congress know it. I bet the number of senators who have actually changed their vote due to these hearings can be counted on one hand.

As for why the US chose to take over PR, the answer is to get more revenue. Any piece of land, no matter how bad, can usually be made to turn a profit _if well managed. The reason PR is a sinkhole is the same reason that CA is a sinkhole: the people running these places are criminally incompetent. The ones in power in 1917 were not this incompetent and thus assumed that the governors of PR would be able to make some money off the transaction. One can hardly blame them for not predicting the unmitigated disaster that is our current government.

July 18

Ken Hechtman writes:

I have a theory about this. I can’t prove it, but if I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with Woodrow Wilson and WWI. The explanation that you can rule out is that Congress granted citizenship to satisfy a Puerto Rican demand. It didn’t happen that way. No Puerto Ricans were even told in advance about it, much less asked if they wanted it. By March 1917, when the Jones-Shafroth Act was passed, Wilson and the Democrats already knew they were going to enter the war and institute the draft. As non-citizen subjects of the US, Puerto Ricans were still eligible to be drafted but that contradiction wasn’t going to fly in the 20th Century, not among Wilson’s Progressive allies, anyway.

Also, even if Wilson hadn’t yet written the Fourteen Points, he had some idea of what the war’s end-game was going to look like. It was going to include de-colonization or at least some form of consent of the colonized. And it was going to include a newly created Right to Nationality. In the future, when a nation took over territory, it would also need to take over the people living on it and offer them citizenship. Puerto Rico’s status was a glaring exception to both principles and the Europeans would have laughed Wilson out of Versailles over it. So Wilson had to clean up his own house before he could lecture the Europeans about theirs.

The other thing about Woodrow Wilson is that while he opposed legal and social equality for blacks, he also believed in expanding the traditional definition of “white” to include Irish, southern Europeans and Jews. He may have thought Puerto Ricans could be brought into the fold as well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 17, 2009 05:31 PM | Send