Thursday, May 28, 2009

Hispanic Groups: Been There, Done That

Hispanic interest groups are headed to the Senate in support of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination, and not for the first time. In 1998, after Sotomayor's nomination to the appellate court level had languished in the Senate for more than a year, a coalition of legal and community groups began to complain that Hispanic judicial nominees were being held up for much longer than non-Hispanics.

Lauren Bell, a political science professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., who was a visiting fellow on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, said that empirically it was true that Hispanic nominations took longer to get through the Republican-controlled Senate. "The Republicans said it wasn't about them being Hispanic, it was about them being activists," Bell said.

Nonetheless, the Hispanic National Bar Association and other groups undertook a major lobbying effort. Ramona Romero, president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, was head of the organization's District of Columbia affiliate at the time. "A group of the Hispanic leaders who are interested in a fair, diverse and independent judiciary took notice of the fact that the Senate was not performing its duty to advise and consent in a fair and appropriate way, and we did take notice and we did act on it," she said.

Their personal appeals and visits to senators attracted the attention of New York Republican Alfonse D'Amato -- who was up for reelection that year. In an interview this week, D'Amato said he appealed to Senate leaders to bring Sotomayor and other Hispanic nominees to a vote. "I really did push for it because she had strong support from the legal community as well as the Hispanic community," D'Amato said.

Romero's association is one of several Hispanic interest groups hoping to repeat their 1998 success. "You can expect that same level of effort and attention will be paid in this context," she said. "You're going to see a very unified community. The people who attack this woman, who question her intellectual firepower, are being extremely disrespectful. I think the woman's record speaks for itself."

A spokeswoman for the League of United Latin American Citizens, a 115,000-member grassroots group with 700 local councils, said her group, the Hispanic bar and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, are expecting to hold daily calls with the White House to coordinate their efforts to build a positive public perception of Sotomayor. "We will do everything we can," LULAC President Rosa Rosales said.

The National Council of La Raza, which usually does not get involved in judicial nomination fights, is joining up with a coalition led by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to build public support for Sotomayor. Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, said the group is ready to defend Sotomayor if opponents attack her personally.

"We anticipate there will be a high level of scrutiny around a nominee to the Supreme Court, but if there's a perception that somehow they're treating Judge Sotomayor unfairly or distorting her record or there's some effort to make a caricature out there, I think that would have a negative effect in the Latino community," Murguia said.