On Sunday's This Week roundtable, ABC national correspondent Claire
Shipman tried to argue that it would be "very hard" for Republicans to
label Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a liberal. "When you look
at Sotomayor's record and look at the cases, it's very hard for people
to make the case that she's a typical, you know, elite liberal judicial
philosopher," Shipman declared.
That was too much even for liberal columnist Cynthia Tucker, who is
currently the editorial page editor of the Atlantic
Journal-Constitution but will this summer move to Washington as the
paper's D.C.-based political columnist [1].
"She is certainly liberal, she's called herself liberal," Tucker
informed Shipman, but agreed that Sotomayor is "nobody's knee-jerk
radical."
Shipman used to appear on the This Week panel alongside her husband,
then-Time magazine Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, but Carney has
since joined the Obama administration [2] as a top aide to Vice President Joe Biden.
Here's a bit more of the exchange that took place on the June 7 roundtable:
CLAIRE SHIPMAN: "I think it's also hard when you look at Sotomayor's record and look at the cases, it's very hard for people to make the case that she's a typical, you know, elite liberal judicial philosopher. I mean, really, she's not. Her cases go back and forth. It's going to be hard for the Republicans to try to pin down what that means. She's tended to give - to be tough on crime, to give police the benefit of the doubt...."
CYNTHIA TUCKER: "As Claire just said, her opinions don't show - she is certainly liberal, she's called herself 'liberal' - but she's nobody's knee-jerk radical. In fact, she often sides with the prosecution in cases, probably from her experience as a young prosecutor...."
-Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center.