So Obama has come out with his pick for SCOTUS: Sonia Sotomayor.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, she’s got one positive mark on her record – she told the MLB owners during the 1995 baseball strike that they had to go back to the negotiation table. Because of this, Obama is selling her as the “woman who saved baseball.” I’m also sure he’ll advertise her as the first Hispanic justice, even though that’s not exactly true. (Side note: check out the argument on the Wikipedia revision page as to whether or not he’s Hispanic. I question the timing.)
Her most recent notable action was dismissing a “reverse-discrimination” claim appeal, which is currently at the Supreme Court: A group of white males who had gotten the highest scores on an evaluation for the firefighting job were passed over, and test scores thrown out, because no black men passed the test. They contended that the decision to pass them over was racially motivated – Sotomayor said they had no case. Fox News just noted that she has been reversed almost every time that her cases have gone to the Supremes, so that could be a potential embarrassment for her during these proceedings. (Edit: CNN has a brief summary of her record.)
She is on record as saying that “the Court of Appeals is where policy is made” – a very unconstitutional position, albeit increasingly popular, especially on the left. In addition, she is a strong supporter of identity politics. She embraces quotas, and suggests that state judiciaries are inherently racist and/or sexist. Fortunately, she has many very obvious soundbites to back up these charges – take this quote:
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.
The current talk from the left seems to be that this isn’t identity politics – rather, it is a “true American story” embodied in this woman, and that her biases and leanings are in fact a boon rather than a bane to justice. Gabe over at AoS has a great post on her sordid judicial history and it’s all very disturbing, to say the least. While on one hand I don’t see how she can be all that much worse than Souter, it’s hard to imagine anyone worse getting picked from the current options available. Here’s another money quote from the same speech:
For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment [inherently belonging to minorities] which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach.
And Gabe sums it up quite nicely in the above-linked post, saying:
The take-away from this speech is that Sotomayor believes that some individuals are better than others merely by fact of the identity group to which they belong. There is nothing more abhorrent to our Constitution and the ideals of our democracy. Such divisions are supposed to be legally irrelevant. We should not be elevating such a small-minded woman to the highest Court.
Emphasis his. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but that sums up the dilema quite nicely – we are now facing not just the quiet, unstated understanding that identity politics trumps all in Obama’s political world, but rather an outright admission and celebration of that fact. God help us.
Edit: looks like Obama’s being careful to say Puerto Rican. Fair enough, I guess.