The Days of Race-Based Policies Should Be Over

But it certainly won't be if Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed:

WASHINGTON - The selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court has opened a new battle in the fight over affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for patterns of inequality, with each side invoking the election of the first black president in support of its cause.

Judge Sotomayor, whose parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico, has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career — as a student activist at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as a board member of left-leaning Hispanic advocacy groups and as a federal judge arguing for diversity on the bench.

Now conservatives say her strong identification with such race-based approaches to the law is perhaps the strongest argument against her confirmation, contending that her views put her outside an evolving consensus that such race-conscious public policy is growing obsolete.

Democrats are pushing the idea that should the GOP block Sotomayor it will drive Hispanics en masse to the Democrat party. You mean, in the same way they all became Republicans when the Democrats filibustered Miguel Estrada's nomination to the appeals court, the first judicial filibuster in history?

Democrats don't think of people as individuals, they think of them as part of some larger group. They're Hispanics, or blacks, or gays or feminists. They assume that everyone in a particular group thinks the same way and will react the same way.

Certainly a case could be made that blacks are about as monolithic a group as you'll find. They regularly vote more than 90% for Dem presidential candidates, and 70% of them voted for Proposition 8 in California. However, I don't remember a great backlash from blacks when Democrats tried to stop Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court.

Hispanics have not shown the same tendencies to be stampeded in one direction. I don't think Hispanics are near as invested in the nomination of Sotomayor as blacks were in the election of Obama. If good cause can be shown to block Sotomayor I doubt if there will be a noticable electoral effect from Hispanics.