I’ve been meaning to get around to reading the Ricci case for a while now, and I finally found the time this weekend to do so.  For those of you who have no familiarity with the case, Ricci v. DeStefano is a case regarding discrimination in the New Haven Fire Department.  The reason this case has received so much scrutiny is its involvement with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who was a member of the Second Circuit that reviewed the case.  It turns out that this case should stand in its own right, even without the artificial limelight it has received since Sotomayor’s nomination.

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So far, she’s been called an “Identity Politics over Merit” pick, a racist, a reverse racist, Maria, Obama’s Miers, and a spendthrift.  Oh, and pronouncing her name correctly is apparently anti-American as well.

Meanwhile, Yglesias is pretty fired up:

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

At any rate, Ann Friedman wrote a great piece on the hypocrisy of this back during the Democratic primary. And I think this item from Neil Sinhababu on constructing political identities is insightful. I think conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

Which was followed by his perfect analysis of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

I was going to say something mean about the minority party members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but then I took a look at the membership and I realized something important:

— Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
— Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
— Charles Grassley (R-IA)
— Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
— Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
— John Cornyn (R-TX)
— Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Those guys are really qualified! Not a woman or minority among them! No identity politics, no weak affirmative action picks, just the straight-up best-qualified white men the country has to offer. An absolutely, positively stellar group. Unadorned meritocracy in action. A thing to behold.

Meanwhile, hilzoy actually looks at the record.  How novel!

The GOP is truely a ridiculously tone-deaf operation.  As if their problems with Hispanics weren’t already big enough.  And, the truly sad part is that most Hispanics would be sympathetic to the GOP’s social conservatism, yet they force them out of the party with all of this thinly veiled racism and blather about “preferential treatment.”

The way this is going, the Democrats will not only take New Mexico in 2012, but Texas and Arizona as well.