It's Sotomayor!

President Obama made a less than surprising choice for the Supreme Court today with Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina jurist who has served as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, trial judge and an appeals court judge. She also was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

As the daughter of a poor Puerto Rican family from the South Bronx, Sotomayor is a slam dunk for Obama, and not just because she is the first Hispanic appointee as well as the third female appointee. She has very little in her background to indicate that she would be a far-left activist jurist, except that she would take people's personal life experiences into account and has been shaped by her own - not something conservatives want to bother with when interpreting the law. But, as one National Public Radio analysis has suggested, the GOP is going to look awfully churlish going after a Latina appointee to the Supreme Court when they are trying to woo enough Hispanics to the party to remain competitive. And the Republican Senate caucus is so overwhelmingly white and male that they'll look even more narrow-minded trying to nail her on key issues.

In any case, this story is yet to be played out. Meanwhile, Hispanics are very proud of Sotomayor's nomination, and they should be. She seems like a fair person. Not so Samuel Alito, the most recent addition to the Supreme Court and who has sided almost consistently with the Court's rabidly conservative, anti-progressive bloc. Even though Alito is an Italian-American, I, as someone who's half-Italian, can't speak well of him. Nor can I speak well of him despite the fact that he's from my hometown.

I probably won't be welcome at a local Columbus Day picnic sponsored by Unico for having said that, but they wouldn't invite me anyway if they knew what I thought of Columbus.