Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by a vote of 68-31 to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court. She received nine “yes” votes from Republicans. Like the nomination of other justices, even those more controversial than hers, this is unlikely to have ramifications in the narrowest partisan political sense. Despite the best efforts of Democrats to whip up ethnic resentment against Republicans who voted against her, the public and Hispanics specifically seem divided but relatively uninterested. With the economy and health care transfixing the country, this simply hasn’t caught the public’s attention.

But there are serious long-term consequences that may well flow from this pick and the confirmation proceedings. The candidate’s lack of any exceptional intellectual or professional achievements lowers the bar from a run of justices who, while diverse in views, shared a high level of jurisprudential accomplishment. (Harriet Miers was appropriately dumped specifically because of her own shortcomings in this regard.) The Senate has also demeaned the confirmation process by allowing the nominee to skate by on obviously incomplete and dishonest testimony on everything from the state of the law to her own handling of a controversial case to the words of her own speeches. This is an injury both to the Court and the Senate.

But the final verdict will be rendered by Sotomayor. Will she be the justice of the hearings or the justice of her own speeches? Will she carry her lifelong crusade for quotas and racial preferences with her — or leave them at the courtroom steps. Time will tell. But in the end, Jeffrey Rosen was right: we could have done so much better.