Who made Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's ethnicity an issue? Ward Connerly, the founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, argues that it was President Obama.

Connerly, who has mounted several successful ballot initiatives combating racial preferences, told NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley that by seeking out a Latina nominee and narrowing the field of candidates, Obama has made it "very difficult to say that this person would be a good jurist."

As for Sotomayor's remark that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," Connerly said that even if every identity were represented on the court, such an approach would still be inadvisable:

If we're relying on a person's experiences, then the law itself is subject to the collection of experiences that the nine judges on the court would bring to the arena. And if you carry that into every judicial setting, then the law becomes whatever any collection of jurists want it to be at any given moment based on their recollections of their experiences on the cases at hand. How can we have any kind of a civil society when the law is going to be interpreted in such a subjective manner?

Even Sotomayor herself is poorly served by the introduction of identity politics into the process, Connerly said.

"The appointing power really does marginalize the person being appointed because then they have to carry all of this baggage of whether they are truly qualified for that appointment," he said. "... She's going to have to prove it. That's really unfair."

Read the full edited transcript here.