May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record had just been savaged in a 54-second video. A woman’s voice closes the video by declaring, “America deserves better.”

That same voice and those same words end two other videos slamming two also-rans for the U.S. Supreme Court, Diane Wood and Elena Kagan.

The video trilogy went up last week on a Web site started by a conservative group, the Judicial Confirmation Network. So when President Barack Obama yesterday nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court from the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, he merely filled in the blank.

To conservative groups eager to do battle, it barely mattered which of the frontrunners he picked. The guns were already loaded and ready to aim at any target.

So-called judicial activism has proven to be one of the more potent rallying cries for conservatives in the past, and they could sure use a rally now.

“It’s an immense opportunity to build the conservative movement and identify the troops out there,” Richard A. Viguerie, an early pioneer of conservative direct-mail fundraising, told the New York Times earlier this month.

“We’ve got the packages written. We’re waiting to put a name in,” Viguerie said before Obama named Sotomayor.

This one-epithet-fits-all approach does nothing to educate the public on the role of the court as a co-equal branch of government or whether a nominee is worthy.

Viguerie called the Supreme Court vacancy a “teaching moment.”

But what is being taught?

Reversal Rate

That partly fungible Sotomayor video opens by claiming in stark white on black, “100% REVERSED.” The 100 grows to take up most of the screen.

A reversal rate that high would be an astounding record, especially for a judge who has been ruling for 17 years. Surely no president would nominate a judge like that.

He hasn’t. The Judicial Confirmation Network’s executive director, Gary Marx, said in a telephone interview that the group had looked at only four of her cases that the Supreme Court decided.

And, oh yeah: Not all of them were reversed. At least one was upheld, it’s just that the court affirmed on grounds different from Sotomayor’s.

So, why would you say “100% REVERSED” when you only considered four cases, not all of which were reversed?

“That’s what we had to look at initially,” explained Marx. “We have found more reversals since then.”

Some Were Affirmed

Pushed on the point, he conceded he had found some that were affirmed, too, though not many.

The way the video twists another ruling, one involving a canceled firefighters’ promotion test in Connecticut, manages to subtly pit her against the firefighter heroes of Sept. 11 and less subtly against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams for racial equality.

It is hardly a stop-the-presses moment to uncover a misstatement of fact or gross exaggeration from an ideological interest group gearing up for a Supreme Court fight. Liberal groups do it, too.

But when the opposition is this ready to declare whomever Obama names a judicial activist based on flimsy research, you know it has little to do with the nominee.

“She thinks the job of a judge is to legislate from the bench,” said Phillip Jauregui, president of the Birmingham, Alabama-based Judicial Action Group, which coordinates research with other conservative groups.

Defining Activism

Why call her an activist?

“She stated it in her own words,” Jauregui said.

He points to what Sotomayor said in a 2005 appearance on a panel at Duke University:

“The court of appeals is where policy is made.”

Aha! Could anything be clearer? Well, yes, it could. Here’s what she said next:

“I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law, I know.” She goes on, “I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, I’m, you know,” and then she laughs.

Then, in a more serious vein, she explains the difference between a trial court, which handles individual cases, and an appeals court, whose rulings set precedent and focus more on the law than the facts.

‘Gotcha’ Moment

Anyone who calls that Duke tape definitive is grabbing for a “gotcha” moment.

So, what in her record reveals her as an activist, I asked Jaurequi?

He referred me to a “one-sheeter” his group produced.

It names only one case of Sotomayor’s, which was reversed by the narrowest of margins, 5-4.

Beyond that, it quotes a 2008 National Review Online commentary that said in the five cases of hers reviewed by the Supreme Court, she pulled “at most 11” votes for her viewpoint out of a possible 44.

If Sotomayor’s rulings are mostly reversed, that is certainly worth worrying about. If she has a wacky view of the judge’s role, she shouldn’t be on the court. If only five of her appellate rulings have drawn Supreme Court rulings, look at her trial court decisions if you want reversal rates.

Obama hasn’t helped his nominee by continually trumpeting empathy as a top qualification for the post. And if her life story, however compelling, is trotted out like Clarence Thomas’s as a shield against legitimate inquiry, then shame on those who use it that way.

This ideological battering won’t doom her nomination, but then that isn’t the point of it, anyway.

The point is to promote the interests of the groups engaging in hysterical exaggeration. For real evidence as to what sort of judge Sotomayor is, look elsewhere.

(Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 27, 2009 00:01 EDT