Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s personal story is a compelling and inspiring one. Rising from a Bronx housing project to Princeton and Yale, and then to the federal bench, she embodies the American Dream, with talent and hard work trumping humble beginnings. So it’s particularly disappointing that she comes to President Obama’s nomination for the Supreme Court with so warped a view of the nation that provided her with such boundless opportunities.
The daughter of a Puerto Rican tool-and-die worker and a nurse, Sotomayor, 54, succeeded because so many Americans made a conscious effort to look past race and class. Yet in her jurisprudence, she would erase the progress we have made towards a society in which a person’s character counts more than the color of his or her skin. In Ricci v. DeStafano, for example, Sotomayor decided that the city government of New Haven, Connecticut, can discriminate in the promotion of firefighters on the basis of race in order to achieve a politically correct result. Such ethnocentric reasoning flatly contradicts President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign promise to move America beyond race-based divisiveness in public policy. And there is simply no way to square Sotomayor’s view with the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection of the law for all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity.
Sotomayer spent 11 years on the federal appeals court in Manhattan, where she morphed from the “moderate” she supposedly was when President George H.W. Bush first appointed her to the bench. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT, who has spent decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewing the qualifications of federal judicial nominees from presidents of both parties, now describes Sotomayor as “extremely liberal.” Many of her appellate rulings have been overturned by the Supreme Court, and her misguided New Haven decision may soon meet the same fate.
But it is her 2001 comment to a Berkley Law School audience that is most revealing of Sotomayor’s ethnocentric jurisprudence: “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.” It is not hard to imagine the outcry that would greet a white male nominee who suggested that his ethnicity and experience would enable him to reach better conclusions than a minority who had lived a different sort of life. He would be dismissed as a racist, and rightly so. Is President Obama now asking that we look the other way when blatant racism comes from an Hispanic woman of otherwise solid achievement?
