Monday, June 1, 2009
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Q&A: WARD CONNERLY
How Obama Made Things Harder For Sotomayor
Ward Connerly Discusses How Identity Politics On The High Court Has Undercut Nominee's Qualifications
"When you start off wanting a candidate with a specific background, you instantly narrow the field."
-- Ward Connerly
With conversation about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor devolving into identity politics, opponents might look to Ward Connerly for advice about how to make their argument. Connerly has successfully convinced voters in numerous states to vote against using race as a factor in decision-making, whether it be in hiring or college admissions. In an interview with NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley on Thursday, the founder of the American Civil Rights Institute evaluated conservatives' case while blaming President Obama for focusing talk about Sotomayor on identity instead of qualifications. Edited excerpts follow. For more Insider Interviews, check out NationalJournal.com's archives.
NJ: You've had a lot of experience successfully making the argument against affirmative action across the country. How do you think it's going for the Republicans who are making the case now?
Connerly: The real problem in this whole debate is that it becomes a conservative-vs.-liberal, Republican-vs.-Democrat argument, and that does not serve the debate well at all. I think that it's a broader collection of people, with a broader collection of ideas and identities, who are trying to get the government out of the business of classifying its citizens according to their physical characteristics or ancestry -- and certainly to get the government out of the business of treating its citizens differently.... But I think that overall the debate is going very well.
NJ: What is it about the debate that makes you think it's going well?
Connerly: There are a number of legislators in different settings now in Arizona, Utah and Alabama who are contemplating the introduction of legislation to either place this on the ballot or to end preferences.
NJ: Anything since this judicial debate started that you've seen as a reaction?
Connerly: Yeah. I was in Arizona today talking with a number of legislators about the prospect at some point of getting legislation introduced, and the whole mood of people is entirely different now than it was, say, two years ago. I think a lot of that has to do with the election of President Obama, and in an interesting sort of way, it has made Americans bolder about their views.
I don't think the American people as a collection have ever really embraced race preferences, ever. But I think there has certainly been a certain timidity about articulating that view lest one be called a racist. Now with the election of President Obama, a self-identified black man, that argument has been stripped away for the most part.
NJ: Rush Limbaugh has called Sotomayor a reverse racist. And Newt Gingrich wrote on Twitter that a "Latina woman racist" should be forced to withdraw, referring to her as a racist. What do you think of the use of that term? Is it too inflammatory for the argument?
Connerly: I don't get the sense that she is anti-anyone. She just believes that, as a person with her specific experience, she could render a better decision than a white male can. That does not, in my view, make her a racist. It means that she is too preoccupied with race, it means that she is using her individual experiences rather than saying, "This is the law."... But I would not personally characterize her as a racist based on the circumstances.
NJ: It seems like the process of selecting a new Supreme Court justice has echoed many of the themes you encounter during debates about affirmative action. Do you see the same thing?
Connerly: The nomination of Sotomoyor has given new life to the whole movement. The same players are out there fighting the issue and the issues are the same. The only difference is that now we are talking about somebody who will have a potentially lifetime seat on the court and who will judge from her perspective as a, quote, Latina. And I think that it's dangerous for anyone to let their personal identity shape their decisions on the court.
NJ: You're referring to the quote where she said a Hispanic woman would, on balance, make better decisions than a white man. But her reasoning for saying that was because a Hispanic woman would be more aware of her experiences and how they might affect her decisionmaking, more so than a white man would be aware of his own biases coming into a decision. Do you think that's true -- that there is a need to be aware of your own experiences before making a decision?
Connerly: I think that one's experiences should be irrelevant. If we're relying on a person's experiences, then the law itself is subject to the collection of experiences that the nine judges on the court would bring to the arena. And if you carry that into every judicial setting, then the law becomes whatever any collection of jurists want it to be at any given moment based on their recollections of their experiences on the cases at hand. How can we have any kind of a civil society when the law is going to be interpreted in such a subjective manner?
This isn't just about the Supreme Court, it's about the philosophy that President Obama will bring to all of his judicial appointments, and in my view this whole notion of empathy and the notion of deciding cases on the basis of your own personal experiences is a dangerous view.
NJ: In the past you have said, with relation to college admissions, that some form of affirmative action would be OK to ensure that a college had a diversity of backgrounds, not races. You don't think that same sort of importance applies to the court?
Connerly: No, I don't. I don't think that we should be looking for identities on the court. I think that we need the most capable legal scholars or people that we can find who know the law and who have experience in dealing with the law. If we're going to start looking for identities on the court, what about other identities? Asians? I don't see any Asians there.... There aren't enough seats on the court to make sure that every perspective and every identity is truly represented.
NJ: When it comes down to it, do you think that Sotomayor would be a good justice for the Supreme Court despite all of this debate swirling around her?
Connerly: I don't know. It's hard to overlook things that she has said and decisions that she has made, for example, in the Ricci case. It's hard to wipe that off the table. The last three or four months, speculation was fueled about her being appointed by President Obama largely because he started out wanting a female and he wanted someone who was Latina, and there aren't that many people who fit those two criteria....
She's being judged in a vacuum, and I think that is something that happens regardless of whether it's her or whether it was Justice [Clarence] Thomas or whether it's somebody else. When you start off wanting a candidate with a specific background, you instantly narrow the field. And so it becomes very difficult to say that this person would be a good jurist. Certainly you can't say this would be the best jurist.
NJ: Would you consider the idea that she was not an affirmative action pick, and was selected because she was second in her class at Princeton and has all this experience on the bench?
Connerly: That becomes irrelevant in the context of the way this has been framed. Second at Princeton and all of that: Most people that react to this couldn't care less. They won't even focus on that. All they're focusing on is the fact that Obama picked someone who is a Latina, first, and second a woman....
I truly hope that some day we can reach the point where an appointment like that would be made and the person's identity would not be accentuated by the appointing power. This isn't just something that Obama is guilty of. George W. Bush did the same thing when he appointed Condoleezza Rice.
It just seems to go with the territory, that you want to take political credit for the appointment of someone, especially when it's a first or a nontraditional appointment. But in the process of doing that, the appointing power really does marginalize the person being appointed because then they have to carry all of this baggage of whether they are truly qualified for that appointment. She may be the greatest thing to ever come along, but she didn't start out with that presumption. She's going to have to prove it. That's really unfair.