I can't see how there's anything enlightening or thoughtful or helpful in getting personal and missing the real point.

If you've never been anything but a white male, then of course “impartiality” seems easily achievable. What has governed us for four hundred years, in this country, has been the law as interpreted by white males. This perspective has been assumed to be the “right” one.

If you've not been a woman, or a person of color, or from a different racial/ethnic background, then you cannot possibly understand why anyone could disagree with you and still be faithful to truth and justice.

About the “empathy” comment made by President Obama in nominating Sotomayor: the opposite of empathy is narcissism, which leads us to take offense when someone doesn't support our perspective and judgments. Narcissism takes the perspectives of others as inherently wrong and thus inviting critical evaluation because, if one looks hard enough, one can always find how someone else's perspective is “screwed up.”

We desperately need Sonia Sotomayor, as well as Pres. Obama, to speak for those of us who've been abused by the Supreme Court in its rulings to this day (not all of them, of course). I lived in AL for 18 years — Jeff Sessions' state — and found that he almost never represented my hopes for the Senate. It would be refreshing to hear him debate someone who does.

If no Senator should ever vote for any nominee who allows their own personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court…No one would be qualified to be a judge. Even trying to be as impartial as possible, no one can completely separate their decisions from their own beliefs, which affect their interpretation of the law.

Everyone's ideals and world views are formed by their personal background, etc., including the 96% of all U.S. Supreme Court Justices that are/were white males. Does Senator Sessions believe that their decisions were all unaffected by their personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies? It seems so, since their behavior has established some Standard of Impartiality that all other judges are to be judged by.
…Is it mocking a person to point out how ridiculous that sounds to the rest of us? then so be it.

Persons opposed to her nomination make her role in all of this sound extreme or as if she was solely responsible. All of the panel judges who heard the case thought a summary order was appropriate. And in the end, a majority of the Second Circuit judges agreed that the panel decision should not be revisited.

To address the point you make which had nothing to do with my post, why are nine enough? It would seem the better way would be to have a national referemdum on every Supreme court case. That way every knowledge, experience, background and sense of fairness etc. would be represented.

That would be as ridiculous as your argument.

Sounds to me that Sessions was more interested in making sure Sotomayor would not fall under those three categories, based on the quotes you listed. It certainly doesn't “prove” bigotry on his part because he's interested in making sure that Sotomayor doesn't have a superiority complex or show contempt for others unlike her, as well as her ability to be tolerant to those not Latina like herself.

One of the all time great rhetorical flourishes in the history of philosophy was Nietzsche’s take on he who would see the world as it truly and really is without the fetters of one’s desires, unconscious predilections, and life history. He called it the doctrine of Immaculate Perception. This, he claims, is a false self-consciousness because in it we desire to be but “a mirror with a hundred facets” that sits before things as they are and perfectly reflects their being. This falsehood, he thought, resides in the fact that the basking in the pure light of the truth of things is but a desire fashioned by one’s life history and culture, and as a desire—my desire–it reflects the unavoidability of the point of view a person uses to perceive his world. To call my view an objective appears to be, as Nietzsche intimated, an ego inflation of the worst order. Who can make this claim especially in areas of human endeavor that are highly contested, as in interpreting the “real intentions” that lie behind a constitutional document?

Nietzsche’s Immaculate Perception is tightly bound to his advocacy of perspectivalism—the view that all points of view are just one (this one included), among myriad, points of view. One can graft onto this viewpoint one pragmatist argument that the truth is what a relevant community will decide is true in the long run, via a communal democracy, if you will. For even in science things change, as from geocentrism to heliocentrism in astronomy. To claim that one’s point of view is objective is to make a claim from a position of an ideal spectator who can compare a human claim with its objective reality and in so doing absolutely verify its objectivity. Who among us can claim to possess this miraculous capacity?

Some people just want to control home plate.”

–Jim, you've just violated one of the main codes of conduct here, which reads, “I will not exaggerate others' beliefs nor make unfounded prejudicial assumptions based on labels, categories, or stereotypes. I will always extend the benefit of the doubt. (Ephesians 4:29)”