Great catch by Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo, who dug up the Senate confirmation vote on Sonia Sotomayor when the Supreme Court nominee was confirmed in 1998 for the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Neither Saxby Chambliss nor Johnny Isakson were members of the U.S. Senate back then.
But eight Republican senators who are still in the Senate voted to
confirm Sotomayor 11 years ago: Bob Bennett, Thad Cochran, Susan
Collins, Judd Gregg, Orrin Hatcy, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe and
Arlen Specter.
Specter has since switched to the Democratic Party, but the other seven
senators are in the position of being asked to oppose the nomination of
a judge they have already voted to confirm for an appellate court
judgeship. Not only that: Sotomayor was originally appointed to the
federal bench in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush. My memory isn’t
as good at it once was, but I could swear that Bush the elder was a
Republican.
That’s going to cause a massive outbreak of cognitive dissonance, for sure.
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