SCOTUS pick: Sonia Sotomayor
So, it’s Sonia Sotomayor. Identity politics triumphs. Here’s the bio/record info I shared at the beginning of the month:
“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be very concerning given her hard-left record on the Court of Appeals, where she is recognized by practitioners as one of the more liberal judges.
-Judge Sotomayor’s personal views may cloud her jurisprudence. As Judge Sotomayor explained in a 2002 speech at Berkeley, she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color” in their decisionmaking, which she believes should “affect our decisions.”
-Only just recently, in Ricci v. DeStefano, Judge Sotomayor was chastised by fellow Clinton-appointee Jose Cabranes for going to extraordinary lengths to dispense with claims of unfair treatment raised by firefighters. Judge Sotomayor’s panel heard a case raising important questions under Title VII and equal protection law, but attempted to dispose of the firefighter’s arguments in a summary order, until called out by Judge Cabranes. The Supreme Court has agreed to review the case.
-Substantial questions also persist regarding Judge Sotomayor’s temperament and disposition to be a Supreme Court justice. Lawyers who have appeared before her have described her as a “bully” who “does not have a very good temperament,” and who “abuses lawyers” with “inappropriate outbursts.”
And here’s the rundown on Obama’s SCOTUS choice from Wendy Long at the Judicial Confirmation Network:
Memorandum
TO: JCN Members and Interested Parties
FROM: Wendy Long, Counsel to JCN
DATE: May 26, 2009
RE: Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor• President Obama has threatened to nominate liberal judicial activists who will indulge their left-wing policy preferences instead of neutrally applying the law. In selecting Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his
Supreme Court nominee, President Obama has carried out his threat.• Judge Sotomayor will allow her feelings and personal politics to stand in the way of basic fairness. In a recent case, Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with a city that used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters. The per curiam opinion Sotomayor joined went so far out of its way to bury the firefighters’ important claims of unfair treatment that her colleague, Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her.
o According to Judge Cabranes, Sotomayor’s opinion “contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at he core of this case” and its “perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.” Even the liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen expressed disappointment with the case, stating, “Ricci is not just a legal case but a man who has been
deprived of the pursuit of happiness on account of race.”o Sotomayor’s terrible decision in Ricci is under review by the Supreme Court and an opinion is expected by the end of June.
• Sotomayor readily admits that she applies her feelings and personal politics when deciding cases. In a 2002 speech at Berkeley, she stated that she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider
their “experiences as women and people of color,” which she believes should “affect our decisions.” She went on to say in that same speech “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She reiterated her commitment to that lawless judicial philosophy at Duke Law School in 2005 when she stated that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”• The poor quality of Sotomayor’s decisions is reflected in her terrible record of reversals by the Supreme Court.
• Sotomayor is a favorite of far left special interest groups. In addition to her record as a hard left judicial activist, Sotomayor has been recommended for the Supreme Court by Nan Aron of the very liberal Alliance for Justice, who stated in a 2004 memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sotomayor had “been through an initial vetting and fit into the criteria that we believe should be the
standard for any Supreme Court justice.”• The White House is sure to argue that Sotomayor is a “bipartisan pick” because Bush 41 appointed her to the district court: President George H.W. Bush nominated Sotomayor in 1991 only because the New York senators had forced on the White House a deal that enabled Senator Moynihan to name one of every four district court nominees in New York. In 1998, 29 Republican senators voted against President Clinton’s nomination of Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.
Legal analyst Stuart Taylor sums up this p.c. pick:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” — Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001
The above assertion and the rest of a remarkable speech to a Hispanic group by Sotomayor — widely touted as a possible Obama nominee to the Supreme Court — has drawn very little attention in the mainstream media since it was quoted deep inside The New York Times on May 15.
It deserves more scrutiny, because apart from Sotomayor’s Supreme Court prospects, her thinking is representative of the Democratic Party’s powerful identity-politics wing.
Sotomayor also referred to the cardinal duty of judges to be impartial as a mere “aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.” And she suggested that “inherent physiological or cultural differences” may help explain why “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”
So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.
***
Update: Obama praised Sotomayor in his announcement for having “saved baseball” and read Nancy Drew as a young child. The White House is pushing the “compelling personal story” angle hard.
There are murmurs of filibuster threats by the GOP.
Alas, those are idle threats, as all the GOP’s past filibuster threats have been over the past year.
Mark my words.
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Sotomayor may be Barry’s best pick if he is trying to stack the SCOTUS deck should one of the 100′s of cases questioning his eligibilty to be POTUS ever gets a fair hearing in the courts.
She’s better looking too.
I see it’s just a matter of degrees with you. While Obama’s abhorrent to you today, tomorrow, he’d be your BFF if the other guy you deemed worse.
You have all the convictions of a weather vane. To you it’s all about the political strategy, no one guy too evil for your vote as long as the other guy isn’t the one you want.
Me, I’ll draw a line, you, you like to move the goal posts. Too many shades of gray for me.
No, Rogue, I’m not a weather vane.
I’m realistic and pragmatic. You’re the one who, like a liberal, lives in a dream world.
Poliktics is about strategy, and so long as you maintain your childish and silly view that you must have a perfect candidate, our country will be at risk because of your foolishness.
Had the US and its allies maintained your kind of “purity”, we would never have allied ourselves with Stalin to defeat Hitler. How do you reconcile that? Were we wrong in doing so?
A quote from someone whose judgment I trust far more than yours:
***
We’ll have to modify the statue of LADY JUSTICE with the blindfold and scales of justice when Sonia Sotomayor takes her place on the SCOTUS.
***
Take off the blindfold and put her thumb on one of the scale pans–the AFFIRMATIVE ACTION pan.
***
She should really help President Obama (PBUH) finish trashing the Constitution and our liberties.
***
John Bibb
***
Imagine that if, during the presidential race, McCain had said that his experiences as a white man in the military would allow him to come to a better decision than a black man.
Yeah. That would’ve gone over REAL well.
Oh yes, comparing political strategy of who’s going to be our president for the next four years, to a war for the very survival of Europe, possibly the world, oh yeah that’s realistic. Please, if you think McCain wouldn’t have put this country at risk with more shamnesty and further abridging freedom of speech, and bailouts, you’re the one living in a dream world. Me, I’d like to raise the bar a little for my Presidential candidates, you, not so much.
Amen Rogue Cheddar. Always choosing the lesser of 2 evils and compromising on every issue to pull in a few more slightly left of center votes has been the impetus for our country’s lurch left on all issues. Now any real conservative is branded a far right wing nut (most of which would be barely right of center 40 years ago). The end result will be the socialization of America since any true opposition will be marginalized.
Yeah, in the meantime, while you vote for someone who has no chance of winning, you hand the victory to the Left.
Way to go.
OK. So voting lesser of 2 evils election after election gave us a candidate that supports amnesty (a strategy proven disatrous after the 1986 amnesty), is a fervent supporter of “diversssityy” and “toollleranncce”, who has sold out conservative values time and again in the name of “compromise’ and on and on. If conservatives had stood up long ago perhaps we wouldn’t have had mcamnesty as a candidate in the first place. So what now, continue down the move left strategy. Oh yea, that’s a proven strategy. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting…..
Weary Citizen:
You are engaging in a straw man. I never advocated moving left. I am talking about being handed two crappy lifeboats as the options for escaping a sinking ship.
And I notice that Rogue never answered my question about our alliance with Uncle Joe during WWII.
Do please, answer, Rogue, instead of evading.
No strawman here. History proves I am correct. Every election cycle the repubs trot out a more “centrist” candidate than the last, hoping to capture a few more votes. We went form Reagan, to Bush Sr, and after a few election losses Bush Jr (barely center) to the king of RINO’s mcamnesty. And now? Many of the gop elites are calling for even more liberal policies/thinking in order to get more votes (ie powell, steele, etc). Why do they do this? Because leemings that vote “r” becasue they are not a “d” continue to support their sorry b*tts. People like Rogue and myself actually practice what the founding fathers envisioned. We evaluate all candidates based on their policy stands and choose the one that best mathches our own vision of the country. Not what some party hack tells us to think. The true “lazy” course is to pull the “r” lever and be done (unless of course you truly support the gop party platform). But hey, if supporting a liberal republican over a liberal democrat is your your thing, then have at it. It’s a free country brother (for now). But don’t expect the republican party to become more conservative if they are not forced to do so. They know they have your vote so there is no need to pander to the passee conservatives. They will pander only to those they can’t count on (conservatives like Rogue and I or centrists). The GOP will not change until they realize pandering to the leftists is a losing proposition. Bank on it.
I really wish I could respond to atheling’s idiocy, but for some reason none of my comments are going through. Why is that?
There we go. Finally got through.
No, it is you who is engaging in a strawman. You are the one claiming that those of us who refused to vote for your “lesser of two evils” candidate did so entirely because he wasn’t “perfect.” You act as if McCain was one or two issues short of conservative purity. But in reality he was nothing of the sort. Indeed, the man was and is a full fledged liberal who sold out conservative principles on countless fronts (immigration being one of the biggest) and who takes delight in stabbing conservatives in the back any chance he gets.
The man has no honor, no principled conservative integrity. His liberalism is leading us toward the very same kind of tyrannical oppression that you fear from the left, albeit at a slightly slower, less noticeable pace. And yet this is the kind of man you think conservatives should have supported.
You are delusional. You say we must embrace the “lesser of two evils” for the greater good, but I say where has that bankrupt pragmatic strategy gotten us over the years? No where good.
It was once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This perfectly captures the mindset of atheling.
Well, I and others like me reject your insane, suicidal way of thinking. Supporting liberalism lite every election cycle may slow down the progressive agenda a bit, but the train will reach the same destination nonetheless. That is why mindlessly supporting the “lesser of two evils” every single time out, no matter how much worse the evils become, is nothing but a guaranteed losing strategy. It’s suicidal and insane.
What’s needed is a rejection of liberalism altogether, not just the more radicals elements and agents of it. In the short-term things may very well get worse, but it is the only way that in the long term things can ever hope to get better.
Someday, hopefully, atheling will grow up and realize this before its too late.
Yes. The Founders had a name for people like atheling: party men. At that time in American history, that was one of the more insulting labels you could give a person. Now party politics is everything, to the detriment of us all.
There you go again, blaming me for you and your candidate’s shortcomings.
Also I’m not evading your question about the alliance with your Uncle Joe, I had just forgotten about it because
of the nonsensical comparison you had made. I trust that Winston made what he deemed an absolutely vital choice for the fight against a superior and unrelenting deadly foe (in no sane way comparable to a Presidential campaign). But I must ask, is this before or after Uncle Joe was known to have systematically murdered millions of civilians and political dissidents?
Six of Eight Sotomayor Decisions Reversed, One Pending.
* Ricci v. DeStefano 530 F.3d 87 (2008) – SCOTUS decision pending as of 5/26/2009
* Riverkeeper, Inc. vs. EPA, 475 F.3d 83 (2007) – Reversed 6-3 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg)
* Knight vs. Commissioner, 467 F.3d 149 (2006) – Upheld, but reasoning was unanimously faulted
* Dabit vs. Merrill Lynch, 395 F.3d 25 (2005) – Reversed 8-0
* Empire Healthchoice Assurance, Inc. vs. McVeigh, 396 F.3d 136 (2005) – Reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Breyer, Kennedy, Souter, Alito)
* Malesko v. Correctional Services Corp., 299 F.3d 374 (2000) – Reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)
* Tasini vs. New York Times, et al, 972 F. Supp. 804 (1997) – Reversed 7-2 (Dissenting: Stevens, Breyer)
* The European Community vs. RJR Nabisco, 355 F.3d 123 (2004) – Judgment vacated and sent back to appeals court
Economic impacts are important only because they lead to impacts on actual people. There are other ways to impact people. Anti gay laws impact gays, for example.