Sharia Law?

President Obama has finally named his choice to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court: 2nd Court of appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who was originally appointed to the bench by George H. W. Bush in 1992.

The usual right wing suspects are predictably beside themselves, erupting in a vitriolic orgy of condemnation:

"Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written," said Wendy Long, counsel to the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network.

"She thinks that judges should dictate policy and that one's sex, race and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench. ... She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court."

OK, read that over again. Sotomayor is more liberal than "the current liberal activist Supreme Court." This is the court headed by right-wing ideologue John Roberts, that boasts ultra-conservative activists Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas providing a hard-core radical-right-wing flank. The swing vote on the current court is justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee whose libertarian streak is pretty much the only thing keeping Americans from living under a de-facto Christianist regime of Sharia Law.

I'd really hate to see the sort of Supreme Court that the Judicial Confirmation Network would approve of. I suepect the Salem Witch trials would seem models of judicial restraint in comparison to the decisions that such a court would render.