Obama: From anti-war law professor to warmonger in 100 days

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the US Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 88 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie.

The other WASP on the court, until he announced his impending retirement - thus paving the way for Sotomayor’s nomination - is David Souter. The two WASPS have been the most liberal members of the court.

There were desultory calls for President Obama to preserve the WASP quotient on the court by picking another white protestant, but Sotomayor fulfilled other, more pressing quota requirements, being a woman and of Puerto Rican ancestry - prospectively making her the first Hispanic member of the court, thus delighting America's fastest growing ethnic group.

Hispanics represent 14 per cent of the population and a quarter of live births

Hispanics are the great brown hope of the Democratic Party and the real estate industry (more or less coterminous), since they represent 14 per cent of the population but 25 per cent of the live births, thus responsible for the fact that the United States is the only Western industrialised nation with a fertility rate above the 2.2 per cent replacement rate.

Since WASPS are busy running America from their clubland bastions in Manhattan and Boston they haven't had time for procreative duties and scant opportunity either, since their leathery spouses spend their evenings going to charity balls and their weekends in the Hudson Valley or Virginia pruning their roses.

The WASP replacement rate is abysmal and their traditional claim to be America's ruling class is under relentless pressure from Jews, whom all WASPs, after a few martinis, invoke as running not just America but the entire world. So these days WASPS sit resignedly in their libraries reading histories of quintessential WASP clans like the Whitneys, the Rockfellers and the Harrimans, or watching reruns of CIA movies - the last genre dedicated to the thesis that ruthless white upper-class protestants run America.

Actually the WASPS fought their decisive battle for power early in the last century, when they realised that the streams of immigrants pouring into the New World from Czarist Russia or Catholic countries like Italy and Ireland would in the not so long term alter the nation's ethnic balance and challenge their supremacy.

WASPS fought back with the programme of population management known as the Eugenics Movement, eloquently defined by a great WASP hero, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declared that: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Starting around 1910, state after state adopted sterilisation laws targeting the non-WASP ethnic strains. Other legislation sought to beat back genetic attrition. The Racial Integrity Act of Virginia rendered it illegal for blacks and whites to marry and reproduce.

By the 1920s, 39 states had adopted legislation prohibiting the marriage of feeble-minded people. There was a building boom in institutions designed to house the insane and feeble-minded around the country. The Minnesota Institute for Defectives had the responsibility "to keep the persons entrusted to our care until they are past the reproducing age".

Between 1880 and 1929, on one historical account WASP eugenicists were able to increase the number of unfit segregated in asylums four-fold; from 31,973 to 272,527 people. Hitler and his associates followed the WASPs' diligent efforts at ethnic cleansing with keen attention and delightedly studied the statutes WASPs rammed through Congress, most notably the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively barred immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

Now we have just one lonely WASP sitting on the Supreme Court bench

In 1927, the United States became the first eugenic nation when the Supreme Court, led by that quintessential WASP, William H Taft, upheld the decision to sterilise the unfit in Buck v Bell by an 8-1 majority.

It was the high-water mark, even though compulsory sterilisation continued for many decades. But 80 years later we have just one lonely WASP, Stevens, in the Court and the incoming replacement for Souter (a childless WASP, generally assumed to be a closet case) a Hispanic woman, admittedly divorced and childless and living alone (thus allowing gays to infer hopefully that Judge Sotomayor replaces Souter as a representative of their orientation.)

The shock jock right-wing radio commentators furiously quote Sotomayor’s remark in a speech in Berkeley in 2001 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".

Sotomayor also took a direct potshot at WASP eugenicist hero Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case."

The right is trying to claim that Sotomayor is a reverse racist, but this, like almost everything the right says these days, is not gaining any traction with the general population. What the right can't do is claim that Sotomayor is any sort of radical. She's not.

Her decisions have generally been pro-business and she owes her career on the federal bench to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who nominated her to the Appeals Court. Moynihan was of Irish descent, but he famously adhered to the WASP belief that an inherent "pathology" disfigured the black family in America.

WASP dominance is on the way out - but their social priorities are safe in the hands of the Catholics and Jews on the Court and Ms Sotomayor is no boat-rocker. ·