US Senate confirms first Hispanic Supreme Court justice

2009-08-07 04:30:24  

    WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) --

The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed Sonia Sotomayor's historic nomination as the justice on Supreme Court.

    After month-long hearings and debates over her nomination, the Senate voted by 68 to 31 to confirm the nomination of the 55-year-old appeals court judge from New York, making her the first Hispanic and the third female justice to sit on the bench.

    "With this historic vote, the Senate has affirmed that Judge Sotomayor has the intellect, the temperament, the history, the integrity and the independence of mind to ably serve on our nation's highest court," said President Barack Obama at a press conference after the vote.

    According to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor was expected to be sworn in as the 111th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday, with Chief Justice John Roberts administering two oaths of office.

    She will repeat one oath as prescribed by the Constitution in a private ceremony at the high court where only her family members are at present, and then take the second oath, which is attended by her family and friends as well as reporters.

    The ceremony will be the first one open to TV cameras in the country's history.

    Sotomayor was born to Puerto Rican parents in Bronx, New York. After her father died when she was only nine, her mother, a nurse, raised two children alone on a modest salary.

    She earned her bachelor's degree from the Princeton University and obtained the Juris Doctor degree from the Yale Law School, where she also served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

    "These core American ideals -- justice, equality, and opportunity -- are the very ideals that have made Judge Sotomayor's own uniquely American journey possible," said the president.

    Widely considered as a political centrist, Sotomayor was nominated by former Republican president George H. W. Bush in 1991to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was nominated by former Democratic president Bill Clinton to the seat she now holds, as a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

    She has been regarded as a potential Supreme Court nominee by several presidents, both Republican and Democratic, and appeared again as a candidate after Souter, 69, announced at the end of April that he would retire from the Supreme Court in June.

    The selection of Sotomayor was considered a way to please Latinos, women and political independent, three major groups of supporters to Obama's presidential campaign.

    However, Republicans and Democrats deeply split over Sotomayor's nomination, due to their rooting disagreements on the philosophical makeup of the highest court.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee breaks ankle upon confirmation

 2009-06-09 05:04:32

    WASHINGTON, June 8 (Xinhua) --

The U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, Monday broke her ankle accidentally on her way to Washington for her confirmation hearings at the Senate.

    White House spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement that Sotomayor tripped and sustained "a small fracture" to her right ankle at New York's LaGuardia Airport earlier Monday.

    However, she has been treated and released, and will keep the full schedule of meetings on the Capitol Hill for her confirmation, Burton said.

    The 54-year-old female judge was scheduled to meet with six more senators, including Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Charles Grassley, the top Republican member on the Senate Finance Committee.

    If confirmed at the Senate, she would become the first Hispanic Justice of the Supreme Court. 　

Editor: Mu Xuequan

News Analysis: Race still matters in U.S.

2009-08-05 08:16:22  

by Xinhua writer Yang Qingchuan

    WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) --

"It doesn't matter if you're black or white." Many around the world are familiar with that famous lyric from the song "Black or White" by Michael Jackson -- a vision for racial harmony of the late U.S. pop icon.

    However, recent U.S. events seemed to prove the reverse.

    In many cases, race still matters in the country. And it can matter a lot in some circumstances.

    "BEER SUMMIT" FAILS TO MEND FENCES

    The swearing-in of Barack Obama as the first African-American president in U.S. history in January has raised the hope of betterracial relations and greater racial equality in the country.

    However, recent racial tensions sparked by a confrontation between a black professor and a white policeman, and the president's uneven management of the issue, demonstrate the complexity and persistence of the race problem.

    On July 16, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a renowned African American scholar at Harvard, returned home from an overseas trip to find the door to his house jammed.

    His driver, also a black man, attempted to help him gain entrance.

    Responding to a report of a possible break-in, Joseph Crowley, a white police officer at Cambridge, Mass., arrested Gates and charged him with disorderly conduct after a confrontation. Prosecutors later dropped the charges.

    The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations throughout the United States.

    Gates and black leaders in the country soon denounced the police action as racial discrimination in law enforcement.

    But Crowley and his colleagues insisted that they did nothing wrong and the professor was arrested because he was defiant and unwilling to cooperate with police.

    With many details of the case still unclear, Obama sided with his friend Gates, and said at a nationally-televised press conference that Crowley "acted stupidly" in the incident.

    However, that claim soon came under scrutiny of the press, which found that it may be too soon to call it a racial discrimination incident, because black officers were also at presence of Gates' arrest and Crowley has no bad record on racial issues.

    A Pew poll found Americans disapprove of Obama's remarks by 41 to 29 percent. Among whites alone, the split was 2-to-1 against him, and this hurt his overall approval rating.

    The president then quickly declared his first reaction unhelpful, and invited Gates, Crowley to have beers with him at the White House on July 31.

    However, observers said the so-called "beer summit" fails to mend fences between the two sides, though it may have helped to save Obama's image.

    After all, neither Gates nor Crowley apologized to the other.

    "The high-profile happy hour with an elite black professor, a white cop and the nation's biracial president won't erase the tensions that led to it," commented the McClatchy Newspapers.

    NEW MODE OF RACIAL CONFLICT

    The race problem in the United States stems from the slavery system in the early years of the United States, and its influence is still being felt in all aspects of American life.

    However, the latest event reflects a new mode of racial conflict.

    Unlike the traditional "rich whites vs. poor blacks" type, now there is the feud between black elites and common whites.

    Gates is a leading scholar at Harvard and was elected as one of the "25 most influential Americans" in 1997. He also has connections in the top level, befriending the president.

    Crowley, in comparison, is just an ordinary cop.

    Such a new twist in U.S. racial tensions can be traced back to the "affirmative actions" taken by leading U.S. universities starting from 1969, observers said.

    That's the year when elite universities began to change their "all-white" image and vigorously recruit black and other minority students, even though their grades may not match some of the white applicants.

    The policy helped to create a new elite group of minorities, called as the "1969 generation."

    Forty years later, many members of the group became leading figures in all areas, including the president, the first lady, many of his cabinet members, and the nominee for supreme court, Sonia Sotomayor, as well as Professor Gates.

    However, the problem is, the rise of these new elites doesn't mean the well-beings of all minorities have improved.

    Juan Williams, a news analyst, pointed out that latest figures show U.S. blacks still double the joblessness ratio of the whites while unemployment rate among Latinos is a third higher than that of whites.

    Blacks and Latinos now make a mere 4 to 6 percent of the elite class, including lawyers, doctors and engineers, though they account for 28 percent of the whole population.

    DILEMMA FOR NEW ELITES

    For the new minority elites, the situation created a dilemma.

    Helene Cooper, a journalist, observed that the "1969 generation" live in a complex world with so-called "double consciousness."

    On the one hand, they are very aware of their ethnic identity and heritage.

    On the other hand, they often struggle to balance between their compassion for minorities and the political need to accommodate the white majority.

    Obama's handling of the Gates-Crowley episode demonstrates that reality, so does Sotomayor's testimony at her confirmation hearing dominated by white Senators.

    "Despite Obama's election, Americans at all levels of society still struggle with racial friction," the McClatchy Newspapers commented in a recent story on the race issue.

Editor: Mo Hong'e