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Maddow highlights Washington Times story on Sotomayor's reversal rate

May 27, 2009 10:22 pm ET

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Previously:

Wash. Times, CQ uncritically report criticism that Sotomayor's Supreme Court reversal rate is "high"

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    • Author by carlileb5935 (May 28, 2009 1:22 am ET)
      2  
      It's all really pretty easy. A true reversal rate would weigh the total number of appeals that were filed against Sotomayor decisions, against the number of reversals from the Court.

      Instead, conservatives are claiming that the number of appeals the court hears is the number that are filed, and that 60 percent of hers are reversed. This is truly bogus.
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    • Author by nerzog (May 28, 2009 8:34 am ET)
      1  
      I especially liked the part about Alito's reversal rate of 100%.

      The Troglodytes' bogus arguments are unravelling one at a time, and they aren't smart enough to notice.
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    • Author by Cannonball (May 28, 2009 10:12 am ET)
      1 2
      It may be confusing as to just why the GOP wants to attack Sotomayor. She is going to be appointed because she is not a liberal version of Bork and we have big majorities. So what's the point? I think it is to smear Obama as a partisan liberal. One problem: he is a partisan liberal and that's how he ran and defeated McCain. We all understood who we were electing and who (and why) we were rejecting. So the GOP big play is, once again, the "liberal" scarlet letter. My beef now is that he has been rebuffed solidly for reaching out to the GOP and is still playing nice. Stop the rope a dope and start punching, Mr. President!
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    • Author by scootmandubious (May 28, 2009 11:47 am ET)
      1  
      When you look at the actual facts, which right-wingers never do, this is yet another empty attack.

      The fact that Alito had a 100% reversal (albeit with 2 decisions) and that Appeals Court decisions get overturned 75% of the time, should be enough to end the argument.

      However, we are talking about folks who still link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda (despite that only 'link' being the result of waterboarding) and still are asking for President Obama's birth certificate.

      While it is tempting to refute these attacks with truth, the bottom line is that the right-wing is not interested in truth. To paraphrase a favorite Jack Nicholson role, they can't handle the truth.
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    • Author by bilbo_dies (May 28, 2009 2:51 pm ET)
         
      Well, heck. If we want to play numbers games...
      If there are 8,000 cases presented to SCOTUS every year and they only accept 80 cases and out of that they reverse 60 (75%) of those you could say that SCOTUS acutally only reverses 0.75% of the cases that are presented to them.
      If you compare that to Sotomayer's rate of being oberturned then she is looking pretty good at 0.08%
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      • Author by nerzog (May 28, 2009 3:44 pm ET)
           
        That's a good point. I would imagine that refusing to take a case indicates that they think it was decided correctly, so why bother?
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