A Republican judge from the 9th had two cases appealed to SCOTUS and two overturned last year for a failure rate of 100%!!! By the way, the Supreme Court only takes cases they want to overturn or remand to a lower court on some issue; they don't take a case to say, "Atta boy!" or "Atta girl!"

I was a little surprised that Obama's team rolled her out so prominently as "the first Hispanic on the Court". It would have been brilliant to treat her the way that Obama ran his campaign. He never drew attention to his race or made hay about this historic nature of his candidacy (in the crass way that Hillary did with respect to her gender). He knew he didn't have to and, if he consistently talked about non-racial issues, he would be perceived as a candidate first and a black man second.

I think the case can be made that she is the most qualified nominee in 100 years. No need to even go to the special nature of her personal history. She was a prosecutor, private litigator, trial judge and appellate judge on the most elite appeals court in the country. Throw in second in her class at Princeton and editor at Yale Law (neither of which can be gained through affirmative action, so there's no perceived tarnish on those credentials -- like there is on Justice Thomas' law degree....)

None of the sitting justices even compare, particularly from the perspective of real lawyers (like me) who are down in the trenches and know how complex and flawed our judicial system truly has become. If Sotomayor had that same resume and was named Kevin O'Connell, that nominee would get 100 votes in the Senate (or 99, assuming that Al Franken doesn't get to vote on this). As it stands, she is an awesome nominee even without considering the race/gender politics.