Court Should Be Blind to Ethnicity: Will

Democrats are mistaken to consider the Supreme Court a representational institution, writes George Will in the Washington Post. Justices should be chosen based on their ability to uphold the law, he contends, not "categorical representation," which he detects in Sonia Sotomayor's nomination. "Her ethnicity aside, Sotomayor is a conventional choice," Will writes.

Sotomayor is, as all of the current justices were, an appellate court judge, and like the liberal justices she "embraces identity politics," espousing the idea that "a person is what his or her race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference is, and members of a particular category can be represented—understood, empathized with—only by persons of the same identity." (More Sonia Sotomayor stories.)