Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that she will judge newly appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh on what he does on the court and not what he did before he was confirmed.
“It was Justice [Clarence] Thomas who tells me that when he first came to the Court, another justice approached him and said, ‘I judge you by what you do here. Welcome.’ And I repeated that story to Justice Kavanaugh when I first greeted him here,” Sotomayor told CNN in an interview airing Saturday.
Thomas also was the center of controversy during his confirmation process when he was accused of sexual harassment following his nomination in 1991.
“Conservative, liberal, those are political terms,” Sotomayor continued. “Do I suspect that I might be dissenting a bit more? Possibly, but I still have two relatively new colleagues, one very new colleague, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. And we’ve agreed in quite a few cases, we’ve disagreed in a bunch, But you know, let’s see.”
Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, said that Kavanaugh was welcomed to the Supreme Court “family,” despite the controversy surrounding his confirmation.
“When you’re charged with working together for most of the remainder of your life, you have to create a relationship,” Sotomayor said. “The nine of us are now a family, and we’re a family with each of us our own burdens and our own obligations to others, but this is our work family, and it’s just as important as our personal family.”
Sotomayor added that the justices spend more time with each other than they do with their spouses, for those of the justices who are married.
Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court last month after his confirmation process was extended after allegations came out against him for sexual misconduct dating back to his teenage years.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in September where Kavanaugh and one of his accusers, Christine Blasey Ford, testified regarding the accusations.
