Reporting from Washington — While some prominent conservative activists are accusing President Obama's Supreme Court nominee of racism, more Republicans are telling them to chill out and "grow up," or they risk damaging the party's chances of expanding its reach to women and Latinos.
Members of the Republican establishment are trying to steer the debate over Sonia Sotomayor away from the battle cries of conservative icons Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, in favor of a more measured conversation about the legal philosophy and qualifications of the first Latina to be nominated to the court.
"I think it's terrible," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in a radio interview, condemning those who have called Sotomayor a racist. "This is not the kind of tone that any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent."
Limbaugh earlier in the week had branded Sotomayor a "reverse racist," and on Friday he compared her to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Gingrich, referring to the high court nominee, said on Twitter this week that "new racism is no better than old racism."
They were reacting to reports of a speech Sotomayor gave in 2001 at UC Berkeley in which she said that "gender and national origins" affect a person's judgment, and that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."
Former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination in 2007, on Thursday threw another log on the fire.
In an interview with CNN, Tancredo accused Sotomayor of belonging to a group that was akin to the Ku Klux Klan, calling the National Council of La Raza, a civil rights and advocacy group, "Latino KKK without the hoods and nooses."
At the same time, the White House tried to defuse controversy over Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, with Obama addressing it directly in an NBC interview Friday.
"I'm sure she would have restated it," the president said. "But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay, she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about struggles and hardship that people are going through -- that will make her a good judge."
