Tom Tancredo the outspoken conservative opponents to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. On May 28, 2009, he made an appearance on CNN to voice his opposition and claimed that Sotomayor was a racist. When CNN's Rick Sanchez asked him if Sotomayor was a racist, Tancredo replied "certainly her words would indicate that that is the truth." He then compared the Hispanic-American advocacy group La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan by saying "it's a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses." On February 4, 2010, Tancredo spoke at the National Convention for the Tea Party movement where
Sonia Sotomayor Appeals in 1998, but they had attracted little attention at the time. The remark now became widely known. The rhetoric quickly became inflamed, with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a "racist" (although the latter later backtracked from that claim), while John Cornyn and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but said that Sotomayor's approach was troubling. Backers of Sotomayor offered a variety of explanations in defense of the remark, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Sotomayor subsequently