Jonathan Turley is an EMBARRASSMENT!

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AMY GOODMAN: Marjorie Cohn, you’re president of the National Lawyers Guild. Your response to the nomination of the first Latina justice, of Judge Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court?

MARJORIE COHN: Well, Amy, I think it’s very significant that she would be the first Latino on the Supreme Court, and she certainly would bring the number of women on the Supreme Court to two, and that’s also very significant. She will not appreciably change the political balance on the court. She will probably be a reliable liberal, very much in the vein of David Souter.

Cases about executive privilege will invariably come before her, such as interrogation policies, preventive detention, state secrets, and her views are largely unknown on issues of executive privilege.

She is a mixed bag. I would not call her a left liberal. She will not be a William Brennan or a Thurgood Marshall or an Earl Warren. Yes, she has ruled in the ways that Tom said on the firefighters case, on the environmental case, but she is a career prosecutor. She was a career prosecutor. And I’m hoping that she has empathy for criminal defendants and their constitutional rights. She ruled in two significant cases to uphold searches where the search warrants were unlawful. She ruled—she upheld the Bush global gag rule that made it harder for women to get abortions. She ruled against plaintiff correctional officers who were retaliated against for making complaints. And she also has a significant background as a corporate lawyer. She dissented in a 2-to-1 decision, ruling against the families of victims of the TWA plane crash in New York. So I think she will be a mixed bag. She will probably be more on the liberal side, but I would not call her an unabashed liberal.

Now, I think that it’s important for us to respond to this whole issue of activist judges and judicial activism, because this is what the right wing is bringing up all over the media waves and throwing at her, that she’ll be a judicial activist. All judges are judicial activists. I mean, the quintessential judicial activism was Bush v. Gore, where a conservative majority of the Supreme Court handed the election to George W. Bush. That was judicial activism. On the other hand, if it weren’t for judicial activism, the civil rights movement would not have achieved the gains that it achieves—that it achieved. So judicial activism is a red herring. Certainly, when a Justice Scalia interprets the Second Amendment or Justice Roberts rules in an abortion case, they are being judicial activists. And although nominated justices come before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate and swear that their views on abortion and the death penalty and gun rights will not affect how they rule, they don’t rule in an ivory tower, and judges do make policy, and, yes, they interpret the law, but they interpret it through their own political lenses. So I think that’s important.

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AMY GOODMAN: And also significant that she grew up right in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. She grew up in the public housing project. I just want to also mention her parents came from Puerto Rico to New York, but her father died at the age of nine, so she was raised by her mother, something that she brought up yesterday, honoring her mother in the White House when she was nominated.

Marjorie Cohn, the New York Times quotes a lecture she gave in 2001 called “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” where she said, “My hope is I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

Can you wrap up for us?

MARJORIE COHN: Yes. Judges certainly make decisions through the lens of their experience and of their background. And the fact that she is a woman, the fact that she is a Latina, is going to invariably figure into her decision making and make her, I think, perhaps more sensitive than she might have been otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: And in terms of the composition of the court, you sound somewhat disappointed.

MARJORIE COHN: Well, I’m thrilled that there will be the first Latina on the Supreme Court and that there will be another woman. But I really would have liked to have seen a real progressive counterweight to radical rightists on the court, such as Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and—Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and—why am I blanking? Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts, four of them, yes.

I would have liked to have seen an Erwin Chemerinsky, for example, or a Harold Koh, even though they’re not women—Erwin Chemerinsky is a white male—but real giants in the area of constitutional rights, civil rights, human rights. I am very supportive of her nomination, and she should be defended, and she should be confirmed, but she is not going to be another Thurgood Marshall. She will not leave an indelible mark on the court, ultimately, the way Earl Warren did or Oliver Wendell Holmes. I could be wrong about that. I think that perhaps Obama missed an opportunity here, aside from all of the incredible qualities that she brings with her, but hopefully—or, hopefully, I guess one would say—he will have more opportunities to appoint justices.

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Presumably, Mr. Turley was already getting ready to make the case that this was an "affirmative action" pick.