'Tea Party' Revolt Drives Votes Against Sotomayor
Republican senators try to ward off primary challenges
The re-sorting of the Senate along ideological lines was accelerated by the eruption of the “Tea Party” movement at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and the beginning of Barack Obama’s. While the origins of the Tea Party movement are contested, an on-air rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli in February 2009 against Obama’s mortgage-bailout plan fueled its rise. Tea Party activists vigorously invoked the Constitution in support of their positions against big government and high taxes.
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The day after Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing ended, Senator Bob Bennett, the junior Republican from Utah, became the first senator to announce that he would vote against Sotomayor’s nomination.
Bennett’s race to the front of the pack was in many respects unusual. Unlike his senior colleague Orrin Hatch, Bennett wasn’t on the Judiciary Committee and hadn’t been vocal on judicial nominations during his sixteen years in the Senate. Hatch and Bennett had a good relationship, and Bennett would ordinarily follow Hatch’s lead on judges, not move ahead of him. Bennett was mild in manner, not someone who liked to attract attention.
Back in 1998, when 29 Republicans had voted against Sotomayor’s nomination to the Second Circuit, Bennett (like Hatch) had been among the 25 Republicans who voted for her. I of course don’t mean to suggest that his vote on her appellate nomination meant that he should be expected to vote for her Supreme Court nomination in 2009. My much narrower point is that you wouldn’t have expected him to be the first Republican to declare that he would be voting no.
But Tea Party activists were unhappy with Bennett. As a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee, he had angered them by pushing for a massive bank bailout in 2008. Worse, he had co-sponsored with liberal Democratic senator Ron Wyden a health-care reform bill that they saw as paving the way for Obama’s health-insurance initiative.
Bennett was up for re-election in 2010, and he knew that he would face a serious challenge in getting his own party’s nomination. Utah’s state attorney general, who was elected to a third term in 2008 by a massive margin, had already launched his own campaign for Bennett’s seat, and an early poll showed him to be in “essentially a dead heat” with Bennett.
So Bennett was determined to oppose Sotomayor and evidently figured that he might win extra credit for doing so right away. He emphasized gun rights, a popular issue in Utah, as his primary reason for opposing her: “I cannot reconcile my strong belief that the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms with Judge Sotomayor’s stated belief that the Second Amendment is not a ‘fundamental right.’”
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As I have explained, Republican senators back in the early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency might reasonably have calculated that deferring to Clinton’s Supreme Court picks provided the easiest path to re-election. If your focus was on defeating your Democratic opponent, then voting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would enable you to win credit from moderates and independents and to avoid creating a controversy that your opponent might exploit.
But the political situation for Republican senators, including conservatives like Bob Bennett, had dramatically changed by 2009. Tea Party activists were eager to challenge incumbent Republicans from the right. So Republican senators had to do their best to guard against that threat.
Twelve Republican senators were running for re-election in 2010. All twelve voted against Sotomayor’s nomination.
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Alas for Bob Bennett, his stand against Sotomayor wasn’t enough to salvage his political career. Bob Bennett had won re-election in 2004 with 69% of the vote. But in May 2010, he finished in third place at his party’s convention and didn’t make it to the primary run-off.
Tea Party favorite Mike Lee was elected to the Senate in November 2010.