Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor may want people to think of her as a “wise Latina,” but she displayed very little wisdom throughout the court’s oral arguments in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor.
Multiple fact-checkers have already slammed Sotomayor for falsely asserting, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” But that was far from her only mistake.
On the 100,000 children claim, not only was this not even remotely true when she said it — according to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are fewer than 5,000 children with COVID-19 hospitalized right now — but over the course of the entire pandemic, only 83,000 children have been hospitalized for any reason. This includes asymptomatic children in the hospital admitted for a broken leg who happened to test positive for COVID while they were treated.
The reality is that from the beginning, almost everyone has recognized that children face much lower risks of severe illness and hospitalization from COVID-19 than older adults and those with comorbidities. As a person with diabetes, Sotomayor knows this, which is why she participated in the arguments remotely.
The nonexistent children-on-ventilators crisis aside, Sotomayor made several other revealing stumbles. She went on to claim falsely that “we are now having deaths at an unprecedented amount” and that “numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did.”
In reality, deaths are far lower today than they were this time last year, let alone as high as they were when COVID-19 first hit in the spring of 2020. And the studies given to the court on omicron showed the exact opposite of what Sotomayor claimed. The available science clearly shows that the latest variant is much less deadly and causes far fewer serious diseases than delta.
Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer did not turn in performances to be proud of either, with both falsely claiming vaccines stop the spread of COVID. Before omicron, at best, you could safely say vaccines markedly slowed, but not stopped, the spread of COVID. Now that omicron represents more than 95% of coronavirus cases, even this claim isn’t true. The number of “breakthrough” cases has skyrocketed since omicron made it to the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted last month it doesn’t know how effective vaccines are at preventing the spread of the omicron variant.
This last point is essential because the legal rationale for President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate rests on the assumption that COVID-19 vaccines stop the spread from infected employees to uninfected employees. If vaccines don’t stop people from spreading COVID-19, then the Occupational Safety and Health Administration certainly has no legal justification for forcing people to inject those vaccines into their bodies.
Not that Sotomayor bothered to empathize with those who do not want to get vaccinated. Quite the contrary, she compared people infected with the coronavirus to machines.
“So, what’s the difference between this and telling employers, where sparks are flying in the workplace, your workers have to wear a mask?” she asked. “Why is the human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus, blood-borne viruses?”
No one seems to have told Sotomayor people don’t lose their humanity, let alone their constitutional rights, just because they clock in at work. The difference between a mask, which can easily be taken off, and a vaccine being shot into a person’s bloodstream seems completely lost on the justice as well.
In multiple speeches throughout her pre-court career, Sotomayor liked to brag that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.” Before she starts reaching for conclusions she believes are inherently better than those reached by judges of other ethnicities and genders, perhaps Sotomayor should take some time to get her facts straight.
