Sotomayor: The 'Radical' Who Isn't

If Sonia Sotomayor is a radical activist eager to push the law leftward or to rule according to personal whims rather than constitutional commands, she's done an impressive job of hiding it all these years...

This is a woman with more years on the bench than any Supreme Court nominee in the past 100 years. During that time, you'd think even the most middle-of-the-road judge would have provided some unintentional ammunition for critics -- maybe freeing an especially unsavory criminal on a supposed technicality. If Sotomayor is the judicial radical of conservative imaginings, certainly there ought to be something more in her paper trail.

Except there isn't -- at least from what's known so far. An examination of Sotomayor's decisions shows a careful judge who tends to rule for the government over criminal defendants; who has been skeptical of most civil rights claims that have come before her; and who, to the extent that she has ruled on cases that touch on abortion, has come down against the abortion-rights side. She's not apt to be David Souter in reverse -- a Democratic pick who turns out to be a closet conservative. But there's no evidence that she will be outside the liberal mainstream on the current court.

Take one of the few cases deployed against Sotomayor: her vote, again as part of a unanimous panel, that the Second Amendment does not extend to state and local weapons regulations. The court said it was bound by the Supreme Court's 1886 ruling that the Second Amendment is "a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state." This is the kind of restraint conservatives claim to like, at least until the outcome doesn't suit them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060202969.html