Few things excite politics junkies quite as much as an impending Supreme Court nomination - it's the Kentucky derby for law nerds, with media-makers and talking heads evaluating the experience, legal pedigrees, and even health of the country's most prominent judges, academics and lawyers.  But this nomination process is looking very different from those of the past, in no small part because most of the favorites are female.

Most commentators are placing their bets on Sonia Sotomayor, Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, with Jennifer Granholm, Deval Patrick, Kathleen Sullivan, Cass Sunstein and Janet Napolitano also thrown out as possibilities. The general consensus that Obama's choice is going to be a woman is not a bad gamble, since women make up more than half of the American public, one-third of all lawyers and thirty percent of lower federal court judges, but occupy only one seat on the current Supreme Court.  Troublingly, though, there have been murmurings that this will be Obama's "woman nomination," and the "racial nomination" will be next - as if women can't be both women and of color, and as if the nominees will be little more than tokens.

In fact, the woman of color who has come out as the front-runner - Sonia Sotomayor - is a politically moderate, highly-accomplished woman who grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and went on to study at Princeton and Yale Law.  She's hardly a left-wing dream - she's a political centrist who was first nominated to the bench by George H.W. Bush - but she's nonetheless already being branded "radical," "liberal" and "activist."  Those who aren't busy launching the usual right-wing hit-jobs on her are relying on gendered and racialized stereotypes to diminish her appeal, even in supposedly progressive publications.  Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic, for example, relies on anonymous mutual acquaintances to paint a picture of Sotomayor as both a lonely single woman who takes her law clerks to see Harry Potter movies and a domineering loud-mouthed brown woman who isn't as smart as she thinks she is - even though, as Matt Yglesias says, "You don't see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at Princeton."  Rosen admits that he is unfamiliar with Sotomayor's judicial record, and doesn't bother to cite any decisions to substantiate his second-hand claims.  At least the right-wing memo that lays out the plan of attack on Sotomayor, Kagan and Wood actually quotes them - although again provides no evidence for the contentions that Sotomayor "does not have a very good temperment" and is prone to "inappropriate outbursts."

Others have written extensively about the gender and racial dynamics of the Sotomayor attacks, and the gendered attacks on all the potential female nominees.  It's becoming increasingly clear that if Obama does nominate a woman, the critiques will follow predictably sexist lines; if he nominates a person of color, the criticisms will be full of thinly-veiled racism.

What's less clear is which nominee feminists and progressive activists should throw their weight behind.  Sotomayor (2nd Circuit Court of Appeals) and Wood (7th Circuit Court of Appeals) are fairly moderate; Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School, and Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School, recently confirmed as Obama's Solicitor-General, are progressive academics, but lacking in judicial experience.  Supreme Court justices tend to move left through their years on the bench, so a political moderate today doesn't necessarily mean a centrist in later years - Justice David Souter, a reliable pro-choice vote on the court was, after all, a Bush nominee.  Obama has said he will not require Supreme Court judges to pass a political litmus test, but most of the nominees appear to support progressive views on hot-button Constitutional issues, like abortion rights.  Wood, for example, wrote the panel decision in National Organization for Women v. Scheidler, holding that women's rights organizations could use anti-racketeering laws to seek injunctive relief against violence from anti-abortion protestors - a position that the Supreme Court reversed.  And Sotomayor penned a very controversial decision about the New Haven fire department's decision to not take a written exam into account when deciding who to promote, because the exam had racially disparate results; white firefighters accused the department of reverse discrimination.  Sotomayor wrote the panel opinion in that case, ruling, against the plaintiffs, that the fire department could legally not take the exam scores into account and simply not promote anyone.  The Supreme Court has since decided to review the case.

Decades of right-wing judicial appointments (with eight years of very moderate Clinton appointments in the middle) have stacked the federal bench to lean heavily right.  Bright and highly capable lawyers have been passed over for judicial appointments in favor of political conservatives.  That's why most of the "liberal" suggestions for the Supreme Court are actually political centrists, and the most left-leaning among them are in academia or politics - there just aren't all that many progressive judges to choose from. 

That is the point we should be taking away from this: The Supreme Court is only one piece of the puzzle, and while it's important for all the obvious reasons, the justices on that bench never hear the vast majority of cases brought in the United States.  The lower courts are the ones doing the bulk of legal interpretation, and setting the legal standards on most issues.  The lower courts are also places where legal talent is fostered and developed, in both the judge's own career and in the work of her clerks and the attorneys who appear before her.  The U.S. Courts of Appeals in particular are often the final decision-makers on crucial questions of law; well over half of the sitting judges on those courts were appointed by Republicans.

Of course, a Republican appointment does not necessarily equal a conservative jurist, and there are many wonderful sitting judges appointed by Republican presidents.  Obama also has no obligation to choose a sitting judge for the vacant Supreme Court seat in the first place; academics and politicians have been put on the Court before, and many of today's finest progressive legal minds are professors, scholars and deans.  It may behoove him to look outside the court house for the next Supreme Court justice. 

But it would behoove all of us for the federal courts to be more diverse when it comes to ideology, race and gender, and to cultivate legal talent at all levels.  Mine That Bird won the Derby this year in a major upset in just over two minutes; the process of picking and confirming a new Supreme Court justice will all be over in a few months.  But the work of nurturing and advancing the most talented competitors is an ongoing commitment.

The battles over critical Constitutional issues - reproductive choice, civil rights, freedoms of speech and expression, the rights of criminal defendants - are played out in court houses around the country, and only a very few make it all the way up to our highest judicial body.  While the fanfare surrounding Supreme Court nominations is a necessity and the importance of that Court should not be downplayed, progressives should take care to give equal - though perhaps stealthier - attention to all the people Obama puts on the federal bench.  A truly progressive legal culture - lines of legal interpretation which affirm free speech, privacy, civil liberties and protections of minority groups and views - requires building from the ground up, not just from the Supreme Court on down.  Liberal lawyers, legal scholars and organizations have done their part to protect the civil liberties, individual freedoms and general equality that our Constitution guarantees.  The courts - and especially the courts of appeals - are necessary to make sure that those values are not chipped away.

Despite conservative hand-wringing about "activist judges," we haven't seen all that many liberal judicial nominations in the past thirty years; we probably won't get a very liberal Supreme Court nominee this time around, either.  But from the look of the shortlist, we will undoubtedly be getting someone intelligent and highly competent.  And once SCOTUS fever wears off, we can get down to the process of balancing out the federal bench - so there will be plenty of seasoned, highly-qualified jurists in the running for Supreme Court seats to come.