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Supreme Court ruling overturns another Sotomayor decision

By Michael Mayday

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of white firefighters who sued the City of New Haven, Conn., Monday morning.

The firefighters accused New Haven of denying them promotions based on their race.

The firemen all participated in tests that would promote qualified firemen to either captain or lieutenant. The tests ended with 17 white firemen, two Hispanic firemen qualifying and no African Americans qualifying.

The City of New Haven decided to throw out the results of promotion tests because of the lack of diversity. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor actually ruled in favor of New Haven when the case was in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

The effects of this ruling will be far reaching, as Justice Breyer noted; but the question remains exactly how far?

Naturally, a thunderstorm has brewed around the decision by the Supreme Court. Conservative bloggers believe that SCOTUS’ (Supreme Court of the United States) ruling proves that Sotomayor is unfit as a Supreme Court Justice.

Ed Morrissey, of Hotair, leads the attack:

“This creates a big problem for Obama and the Democrats in Congress. They certainly have the votes to confirm Sotomayor, but their big sell — that she was one of the appellate court’s most brilliant minds — just took a body blow on this decision. Most people want to move past the old arguments on race and hiring, feeling that forty years of affirmative-action policies have run their course. Having to defend a jurist who attempted to impose them in a court case will not make Sotomayor seem moderate or reasonable at all, but extreme and perhaps less than competent.”

The liberal bloggers, predictably, beg to differ. They claim that Sotomayor had no real choice in the way she ruled as a Judge for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

As the wonkroom’s Ian Millhiser explains:

 

“New Haven’s decision to toss out test results after a promotion test was administered is not unprecedented. Indeed, in the 1984 case Bushey v. New York State Civil Service Commission—decided eight years before Sotomayor became a judge—the Second Circuit considered a nearly identical case. Just like in Ricci, in Bushey white applicants significantly outperformed minority applicants on a promotion test, and the employer in Bushey responded by adjusting minority scores upward to render more non-whites eligible for promotion. The court upheld this rescoring of minority applicants, explaining that employers are allowed to “voluntarily compl[y]” with civil rights law by reconsidering tests that have an adverse impact on minorities.
 
Because Bushey has never been overruled, it is considered a binding precedent in the Second Circuit, and Judge Sotomayor was required to follow it when her panel was called upon to decide Ricci. To do otherwise would mean ignoring the law in order to benefit a sympathetic plaintiff—exactly the kind of “judicial activism” Buchanan accuses progressive judges of engaging in.””

 

Matthew Yglesias, of thinkprogress.com suggests that the city was right to throw out the tests in order to progress the rights of a minority:

 

“This seems like a good time to link to Ramesh Ponnuru’s smart New York Times op-ed on this case. Ponnuru makes the eminently sensible point that whether or not you like the conservative justices’ new rule, there’s nothing “originalist” about legal conservatism’s hostility toward policies designed to provide assistance to non-whites. It’s pretty abundantly clear from the historical record that the congresses that framed the Civil War amendments were not opposed to remedial measures designed to advance the interests of African-Americans. The view that the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment exists to protect the whites from unfair efforts to help non-whites is perhaps legitimate, but unquestionably an ahistorical take on the issue developed by conservatives relatively recently. I would also add that there’s a common sense difference between courts stepping in to protect a minority group from the depredations enacted by majority-controlled elected branches of government, and the idea of courts stepping in to protect the majority group from the political process.”

 

It’ll be difficult to see how this ruling will affect Sotomayor. It may have little affect on her nomination, but then again, it may be a bruise when she shows up to the Senate. Regardless, Republican senators have just gained a bit more ammo in the confirmation battle.

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