A Supreme Court junkie on Sotomayor

Barbara Perry is in Charlottesville this week, not Washington. But that doesn’t mean that this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor aren’t uppermost in her mind.

“I was up in Washington last week,” said Perry, the Carter Glass Professor of Government at Sweet Briar College, on Tuesday. “But now I’m just watching it on TV.”

Author of six books on the nation’s highest legal authority, Perry is more than just a Supreme Court expert — she’s a Supreme Court junkie. And while she predicts that Sotomayor will be confirmed, she confesses to being somewhat underwhelmed by her judicial presence.

“With the exception of John Roberts, you would be hard-pressed to top anyone on the court who has the credentials of Sotomayor,” Perry said, “but I’ve been disappointed with her writing style and also with her oral performance.”

Moreover, Perry pointed out, Sotomayor’s now-notorious “wise Latina woman” comment in several of her speeches — “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion” — showed poor judgment.

“As the highest-ranking person of Latino descent on the federal bench, it was obvious that she would be among the frontrunners the next time there was a vacancy. Given that, she should have been more careful as to what she said publicly.”

All that aside, however, Perry feels confident that Sotomayor will eventually step up on the bench to replace the retiring David Souter.

“The math is in her favor, barring some sort of meltdown,” Perry said.

Perry’s books on the court include “The Supremes: An Introduction to the United States Supreme Court Justices,” “The Priestly Tribe: The Supreme Court’s Image in the American Mind,” “A Representative Supreme Court: The Impact of Race, Religion and Gender on Appointments” and (with Henry Abraham) “Freedom and the Courts: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States.”

Now, she’s working on a fifth, “Catholics and the Supreme Court,” juggling it with yet another book: “Rose: Mother of the Kennedy Image.”

“I tried to use the Catholic idea for my Ph.D. thesis,” Perry said with a laugh, “and my adviser said he didn’t think it was very interesting. So I did something else. Now, I’ve been interviewed several times on CNN about that very topic. I had to smile to myself.”

If Sotomayor is confirmed, Perry pointed out, Catholics would have a 6-3 majority on the court.

“That’s remarkable,” she said, “when you consider it wasn’t that long ago that John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was an issue.”

In theory, each Supreme Court appointment is supposed to go to the best-qualified jurist in a very deep pool of candidates. That, of course, has never been the case.

For openers, no president is going to nominate a Supreme Court candidate with different views than his own. Beyond that, as Perry has pointed out, there is the desire to make the court more representative (with its accompanying political motivations). Ronald Reagan, for example, tried to combat a “gender gap” problem by choosing Sandra Day O’Connor with his first appointment.

“At one time, there was a Catholic seat and a Jewish seat,” Perry said. “If a Catholic justice left, the tendency was to pick another Catholic.”

The rising tide of Hispanic voters in this country has made the Sotomayor hearings a minefield for Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. On one hand, it has become almost obligatory to oppose a nominee from the other party. At the same time, no one wants to wind up on a Hispanic enemy’s list.

“I think it’s more political than ever before,” Perry said, “and I blame a lot of that on the Internet, 24/7 cable news and talk radio. It’s hard to find unbiased information about the candidate any more, and that leads to polarization.”

Perry did a full hour on the totality of the Sotomayor hearings for “At Issue,“ a Wisconsin Public Radio show, on which she is a regular guest.