Independent groups are taking to the airwaves to weigh in on the debate over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, whose confirmation hearings began July 13 in the Senate. The liberal Change Campaign Committee and Hispanic group Presente.org are airing a Spanish-language radio ad in Florida. The groups also posted the ad, with a translation and some video, on YouTube:
Two versions of the ad take Republican Reps. John Mica and Adam Putnam to task for not denouncing the words of radio host Rush Limbaugh, whom the groups identify as a "Republican leader." The unelected Limbaugh may be influential with some listeners, but we’ll leave it to our readers to determine how much of a party leader he is, and to decide how responsible these two members of Congress are for his words.
Aside from that, the ads stick to the facts. They accurately capture Rush Limbaugh saying that Sotomayor "doesn’t have any intellectual depth. She’s an angry woman, she’s a bigot. She’s a racist." Limbaugh said that on the May 27 edition of his radio program. While he has not retracted his comments, he has also allowed that he could support her nomination if she "has sensibility toward life in a legal sense."
And the ads correctly say that Sotomayor would be the "first Latina" and the "first Puerto Rican" to sit on the Court, staying away from the mostly academic argument, which we laid out in an Ask FactCheck, about whether or not she would be the first Hispanic to do so.