NEOAVATARA

“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

Barack Obama announced the Justice Sonia Sotomayor would be named his choice to succeed Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor would be the third female justice in American history, following Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  More importantly, she will be the first Hispanic to sit on the country’s highest court.

She grew up in the South Bronx, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. Her father, a manual laborer who never attended high school, died a year after she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight. She was raised by her mother, a nurse, and went to Princeton and then Yale Law School. She worked as a New York assistant district attorney and commercial litigator before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended her as a district court nominee to the first President Bush.

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.”

However, Sotomayor is a controversial pick.  She is certainly, by far, the most liberal of the people considered by Barack Obama.  Her pre-eminent legal belief is on fairness…which is fine, except sometimes she ignores the law and constitution to carry her vision of fairness out.  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.”

Sotomayor has a controversial track record, with at least 4 cases overturned by the Supreme Court, and one about to be overturned (from Judgepedia):

• The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel’s opinion that contained “no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case.”  The Supreme Court will very likely overturn this case, with her opinion, in the near future.
• In Knight v. C.I.R., (128 S.Ct. 782, 2008.), the Court found that, based on an erroneous interpretation of the tax code, Judge Sotomayor applied an incorrect standard.
• In Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit, (547 U.S. 71, 2006), SCOTUS declared Sotomayor failed apply precedent correctly.
• In New York Times, Inc. v. Tasini, (533 U.S. 483, 2001), the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s reversal of Judge Sotomayor’s district court ruling that the Copyright Act permitted electronic publishers to reproduce all articles in a periodical under a “collective works” privilege, concluding that Sotomayor erred in her interpretation of “revision of [that] collective works” privilege in the Act.
• In Correctional Servs. Corp. v. Malesko, (534 U.S. 61, 2001), the Court reversed Sotomayor for allowing an inmate to sue a halfway house operator for negligence based on a Bivens claim. After the trial court dismissed the case, Judge Sotomayor reversed and reinstated the litigation. The Supreme Court reversed Judge Sotomayor’s decision, holding that the former inmate did not lack effective remedies and that he had full access to remedial mechanisms established by the Bureau of Prisons. The Court also held that the former inmate’s suit would not have advanced Bivens’ core purpose of deterring individual officers from engaging in unconstitutional wrongdoing.

She is the one candidate that will likely unify the Republicans…no one else could have done that. Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court will 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.  Her 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 decision making, which she believes should “affect our decisions.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch said that statements made by Sotomayor about judges making policy was a cause for concern that could hold up a potential nomination by President Obama.  “She would have, I think, a more difficult time if she was nominated because of statements like that and, of course, she has a whole raft of opinions that I think would have to be scrutinized very carefully,” Hatch said.  The remarks Hatch refers to can be seen below.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-qUvI6WFo

In the end, Sotomayor’s pick shows Obama to be every bit the partisan liberal as Samuel Alito’s pick showed Bush to be a conservative partisan. Obama highlighted her upbringing surrounded by poverty.  Well, I admire that.  But wonder why Democrats such as Claire McCaskill don’t remember that Clarence Thomas also came from nothing…and didn’t give him the same praise.  Curious.

Sotomayor is the embodiment of the perfect liberal justice:  someone who believes fairness supercedes the law and constitutionality when necessary; that the rights of an individual is not sacrosanct, but at least partially dependent on their sex, religion, and color of their skin.  Fairness in her eyes does not only take actions and laws into context; it also takes past history, which should have very little to do with jurisprudence.

The Heritage Foundation has extensive coverage that can be seen here.  Additionally, Wendy Long at NRO has an excellent, concise synopsis of Sotomayor’s judicial activism:

She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.

Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.  She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.

She reads racial preferences and quotas into the Constitution, even to the point of dishonoring those who preserve our public safety.  On September 11, America saw firsthand the vital role of America’s firefighters in protecting our citizens.  They put their lives on the line for her and the other citizens of New York and the nation.  But Judge Sotomayor would sacrifice their claims to fair treatment in employment promotions to racial preferences and quotas.  The Supreme Court is now reviewing that decision.

Whether it practically matters, with her replacing the liberal David Souter on the court, is debatable; but as a symbol, her choice is clear.

In short, Obama is proving himself to be the extreme liberal we on the right always knew him to be.

SHOULD REPUBLICANS FILIBUSTER THIS NOMINATION?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/26/sotomayor.reax/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/28/rollins.sotomayor/index.html

I have been thinking about how conservatives and Republicans should confront Sotomayor.  Let us be honest; anything short of a murder in her past, and she will be confirmed.  So we are not choosing beween on-the-court/off-the-court.  We are only talking politics here.

I have heard a number of commentators, from Rush Limbaugh to Charles Krauthammer, suggests that we should go all out against this nomination.  I disagree, in some respects.

I would hope Senators will grill the Judge very hard.  Every Supreme Court Justice should have to be vetted fully, and I fully expect that will be the case in this respect.  She will have to answer for some of her more ludicrous rulings.  And we should get a better idea of who she is.  Let her defend her record; she is an ultra-liberal, after all.  And we should attack her on her record, and ignore the race baiting from the left.

But in the end, I am of the mind set that elections mean things, and President Obama, like it or not, gets to choose whomever he wants.  Those Republicans that didn’t vote for John McCain, for one reason or another, you got your wish.  Unless something totally exculpatory comes out about Ms. Sotomayor, she should be nominated.

At the same time, however, Republicans should clearly show that they are against Ms. Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy.  The word of the day is ‘due diligence‘.  They should make it clear in hearings, in public, and in their final votes.   Democrats also have questions; both sides should completely vet the justice.  We should be respectful, stay out of her personal affairs (unlike Democrats do with Republican nominees), and criticize her on her record, and her record alone.

In the end, this changes almost nothing.  She is 15 years younger than David Souter, so she will be a firm liberal vote for the next generation…but again, elections have consequences.  But we should show that no matter how qualified she is, her philosophy is wrong for the country, and let her be on her way.