Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who received media interest amid President-elect Donald Trump’s attacks on fellow Latino-American judge Gonzalo Curiel during election season, “demurred” from commenting on the campaign when asked Tuesday evening if she felt any apprehension about the result.
“I think that this is the time where every good person has an obligation both to continue being heard and to continue doing the right thing. We can’t afford for a president to fail,” the Obama-nominated jurist—the first Latina to serve on the High Court—said before a small audience at the Hill Center in Washington, D.C.
“[W]e can’t afford to despair,” she added, “and we can’t afford to give up on pursuing the values that we and others have fought so hard to achieve. And so for me, this is a challenge, so I’ll continue doing what I think is the right thing.”
NBC News’s Lester Holt asked Trump in June if it would “be his wish” that Sotomayor would recuse herself from any cases concerning immigration polices enacted during his administration. “No, it wouldn’t,” Trump responded. “I’d want people that can vote on anywhere. I want people without conflict, and you have to assume they don’t have a conflict.”
Sotomayor, one of the Court’s more left-leaning as well as publicly gregarious members, answered questions from interviewer Bill Press and the audience during the course of more than an hour, speaking at length on her formative years in law, her judicial philosophy relative to the late Antonin Scalia and her more originalist contemporaries, and some specific matters of case law she has addressed as a justice during her tenure. One was affirmative action, which has come before the Supreme Court in such cases as Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) and the Fisher v. University of Texas decisions (2013, 2016).
“Do we still need it?” she asked of the general idea. “If we are committed to ensuring that as a society everyone is stepping outside of their sort of regular routine and stepping outside of what’s easy to do to create a more equal society, then we do need, if not affirmative action, we need that spirit that says we want to be more than we are. We want to be a country that stands as a beacon for every one of its citizens.”
The first of President Obama’s two appointees to the High Court, a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, has said she benefitted in part from affirmative action, as she reaffirmed Tuesday. But she also touted the merits of her academic and professional credentials; she’s been a federal judge since Bill Clinton first became president.
“I’m a person who very much doesn’t believe in the old Bakke type of affirmative action, of quotas and things like that,” she said, referencing the 1978 landmark Supreme Court case. “But I do believe that we have to be committed to ensuring that the processes we have in place to select are really selecting on the basis of potential and merit, and not on the basis that happens in many situations: of ingrained habits.”
