Opinion: Enough already, Mr. President
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President Obama threw a party at the White House this morning for new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He shouldn’t have invited her, and she shouldn’t have come. Her appearance exacerbated the politicization of the court that led so many Republican senators to vote against her.
In celebrating what he called an ‘extraordinary moment for our nation,’ Obama didn’t pressure Sotomayor to vote in a particular way. Still, it was unseemly for the president to treat Sotomayor’s confirmation as a political trophy. The victory party undermined the symbolism of Sotomayor’s swearing-in at the court rather than at the White House.
Until her confirmation, Sotomayor was in a sense a creature of the executive branch headed by Obama. Once she was confirmed and sworn in, she was (and is) an officer of an independent branch of government that is often called upon to overturn the actions of the other two branches.
One of my favorite scenes in ‘Becket,’ the biopic about the 12th century saint, is when Richard Burton as Becket realizes that he can’t serve simultaneously as archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England. Never mind that he owes his appointment as archbishop to King Henry II (played by Peter O’Toole). I wouldn’t push the church-state analogy too far, but Sotomayor also may be called upon to reprimand her patron. With that in mind, she should have spent this morning poring over briefs.