Excited
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Neutral Man’s Burden | ||||
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At his best, Stephen Colbert is brilliant, and this past week, The Colbert Report had a brilliant “The Word” segment- “Neutral Man’s Burden” – a play on the phrase “White Man’s Burden.”
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, this past week was the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, potentially the first Hispanic American Supreme Court justice. Republican senators were questioning Sotomayor and taking a lot of her “controversial” comments of “Wise Latina” out of context, despite the fact that Republican appointed nominees such as Justice Alito have made similar comments in the past about how one’s background and upbringing shapes one’s views in life (no duh. Humans are not robots.)
This got me to thinking about what kind of confirmation hearing we would see if an Asian American was nominated to the Supreme Court and what “biases” would be projected on that nominee, which is why I thought Colbert’s segment was brilliant. Cobert asked:
“In America, white is neutral … The personal backgrounds [of Supreme Court justices] had nothing to do with the all neutral [white] court’s decision that it was legal to send Japanese Americans to internment camps in 1942. Imagine how the life experiences of an Asian judge would have sullied that neutrality.”
Yes, imagine indeed if there was a Japanese American Supreme Court justice in 1944 when Korematsu v. United States was decided, which validated the United States government of interning Japanese Americans. Cobert’s comments also reminded me of an earlier posting of mine where all Americans, including Asian Americans, subconsciously expect business leaders to be white. Let’s hope that if an Asian American is nominated to the Supreme Court, that nominee will be given more respect during the nomination process.
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I agree the Republicans' focus on "neutrality" is rediculous, considering she has more experience judging actual cases (and in doing so removing her own biases from the equation) than anyone else sitting on the Supreme Court today had when they were nominated.
But the reason they're going hard on her isn't her race. The reason is a lot simpler. This is partisanship, plain and simple. A Democrat president nominates a Supreme Court justice, so Republicans have to find fault with her. It's the job their base expects them to do. If she were white, they'd be giving her just as hard a time and spending just as much effort trying to nitpick through her past for any excuse to paint her as an "activist judge".
After all, "activist judges" are what you call those who make decisions Conservatives do not want them to, and "legislating from the bench" is the term for throwing out any law enacted by a Conservative (Republican) congress on constitutional grounds they disagree with.
Thanks for the pointer. I thought that the reference he made to the Japanese American internment was a very good one.
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[...] War II as China became an ally against the Japanese. Ironically, the repeal of the Act followed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But you have to wonder; why would any Asians want to immigrate to the United States, after such [...]