Because I believe the context of her speech derails the pathetic attempts by the white house press office to smooth over her radical views, here I quote more of Sonia Sotomayor’s  infamous Berkely speech:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

This is a terrible person to put on the bench. Basically, what she’s saying here is that she’s accepted that her racial identity has left her biased, and she will employ this bias in interpreting law. Actually, she goes farther than that, contending that this bias will actually make her a better judge than others who don’t share her bias. I would hope that any judge, but especially a supreme court justice, would make an effort to keep her bias under control and weigh against the law every fact relevant to a case, not just those which resonate with her prejudices.

I must disagree somewhat with Brian’s assessment that this is a good political play for Obama.  In the short term, it certainly plays to his strengths (identity politics, arbitrary historical milestones, etc.).  But it will not help Obama any in terms of his legacy.  And it will hurt him more than it helps him come reelection time.  Obama won by fooling folks into believing him a moderate.  That will be a tougher sell when he’s nominating extremist judicial activists to the bench (as if nationalizing corporations, even entire industries, wasn’t enough to do the trick).  FDR learned this lesson when he attempted to stack the supreme court with additional puppet justices in addition to the customary nine, in order to ram through policies which the court opposed.  It was a political disaster, and it damaged his ability to implement his expansive New Deal policies.

Is this really the type of precedent the democrats want to set for supreme court appointments? What will they say when a republican president hypothetically appoints a reactionary right-winger – “You can’t do that!”  “Why not, you did”?  I would caution the democrats to recall that despite democrat legislative successes, the republicans have controlled the presidency for most of the past 40 years – and therefore have made many more republican appointments to the court. These have been mostly moderate, as evidenced by the current makeup of the court, and aside from a few disastrous rulings, this moderation has served to maintain the supreme court’s most valuable service to our republic – stability.  Without a consistent application of law over long periods, everything falls apart.  Moreover, the trend of republicans holding the presidency will not likely end soon, so it may be unwise for democrats to open Pandora’s Box on the supreme court, tuning it into an instrument of extremist politics.  The unsuing tug-of-war would be extremely damaging to the republic.  They may win this initial battle but ultimately lose their war.  That is why this flavor of the day type of extremist appointment is a bad idea, even from the democrats’ point of view.

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