A few thoughts on the Sotomayor nomination

Yes, it has been over a month since my last real post. My basic excuse is that I have been trying to hammer out an academic piece, have traveled across the country, then traveled half-way across the country twice. Yeah, blogging has been low on my priority list.
I suppose the biggest current events topic to happen recently on which I might have something interesting to say is regarding the Sotomayor nomination. If you scroll down and look at my May 2nd post, you’ll probably figure out that I wasn’t surprised by the nomination. In effect, Obama took the politically smart strategy by attempting to shore up two important constituent groups: women and Latin Americans.
Supreme Court nominations are difficult for me. To be blunt, no one I like will be nominated to the Court due to political realities. My views don’t fit neatly into the dominant judicial philosophies. I don’t like Federalist Society people because the ideology is naïve. I don’t like the “living Constitution” people because you can get the Constitution to say anything you want. I guess my preference is something closer to Paul Dehart’s Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design. (This is an interesting, but hard read. If interested in checking it out, you can find it at Amazon here: Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design) The basic problem is that Dr. Dehart’s system is too complex for most people to be able to follow it without certain philosophical training. Politicians tend to not appreciate such things, so it won’t get any real Supreme Court play.
Getting back to Sotomayor, she actually doesn’t scare me as much as one might think. I am strongly pro-life. I have no idea what she is, which means she is probably not as adamantly pro-choice as Obama. I believe the government should help people when it will actually help them (NOT all the time). Her view on the role of government seems to be broader than my own, but not much.
One thing I will say is that she probably won’t be an intellectual powerhouse on the Court. Truth be told, I think that’s fine. Don’t get me wrong, she’s smart. She’s just not Scalia or Roberts smart. Few individuals are. But she is replacing Souter, who also wasn’t an intellectual superstar. As far as intellectual capacity, she will probably be right in the middle. I guess one way to put it is that she is well over minimum threshold for intelligence to be a justice.
Pending new information, I hope she gets confirmed. I hope she is confirmed because she will do less damage than most of the other options Obama had. I sincerely hope the Democrats don’t do to her what the Republicans did to Harriet Miers. I doubt that is much of a concern, though, because the Democrats know better than to alienate TWO core constituencies.