No further discussion is necessary to determine whether the U.S. Senate should take as much time as is needed for a thorough evaluation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record and jurisprudence. That’s the take-away from the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Ricci v New Haven decision Monday. The case is the result of the New Haven fire department’s decision to throw out the results of a test used to determine who got promotions. The results were tossed because no minorities achieved high enough scores to gain promotions. The firemen who scored well on the test sued, arguing that promotions for which they were clearly qualified as a result of their test scores were nevertheless denied because of their race. When the case was appealed, Sotomayor joined other judges on the Second Circuit in unanimously affirming a lower court’s ruling in summary judgment in favor of the decision to throw out the test results. In other words, Sotomayor approved of New Haven’s decision to let racial considerations trump other considerations in determining eligibility for promotions.

Although the Court decision came on a 5-4 split among the justices, they all agreed (for different reasons) that the lower court used the wrong legal standard, according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan. Sotomayor and her colleagues too quickly dismissed the facts of the case and favored the racially discriminatory policy defended by New Haven. Welcome to the flipside of Sotomayor’s “wise latina woman” remarks: Policies that benefit minorities are worthwhile because of the value of minority experience, but those that don’t lead to more minority advancement should be dismissed.