Sotomayor

Jesuit Scholastic Matt Malone, in his post at America's blog In All Things says,

Memo to those who missed this week’s Sotomayor hearings: Imagine a cocktail conversation between Hume and Aquinas, or Karl Marx and Adam Smith, or maybe even Jack Webb and Cheech Marin and you get some idea of what this rigmarole sounded like: two people

(Sotomayor and her G.O.P. interlocutors)

having what appeared to be a conversation, but was in fact a series of monologues by people who have such radically different philosophies that there is only the narrowest conversational opening between full-blown debate and mannerly chit chat. Some tried, but they all missed the opportunity and that is why the hearings were such a snoozer. Every party to the hearings wanted to avoid a vigorous open debate--the G.O.P. because it did not want to be remembered for its shabby treatment of the country’s first Latina justice, and Judge Sotomayor because she wanted to quietly get the heck out of there without doing any harm to the all but certain prospect of her confirmation. And so it is that the country missed another chance to have a desperately needed, meaningful exchange about our constitutional system.

Read Malone's constitutional conversation post (here) entitled, Last Thoughts on the Hearings. Missing in the article were Judge Sotomayor's Catholic background, her position on abortion, stem cell research, the 2nd Amendment, her position on the white fireman's discrimination case and the famous "Latina woman" comment.