Posts Tagged “Sonia Sotomayor”

From the JG letters to the editor, and yes, this is the entire letter.

Public option is key to health care reform
We can’t afford to wait for reform.
Reform with a real public option is key to expanding coverage.
A real public health insurance option is crucial to lowering costs.

TONY MILLER
Fort Wayne

The “other side” is obviously informed, no? And this begs the question. Just who is asleep at the wheel at the JG editorial department?

Nothing like having an argument with “nothing” to back it up.

This is bad news for Obama’s choice for SCOTUS.

From WhaPo

The Supreme Court today narrowly ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said they were denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor and others that had come to play a large role in the consideration of her nomination for the high court. More [here].

So the shoe drops on Obama’s first Supreme Court selection proving yet again she’s not one of the brightest bulbs in the pack.

Full decision can be read [here PDF - file].

While I doubt any efforts will be rewarded with steamrolling her nomination, I don’t think the republicans are going to have a hard time pouncing on Sotomayor.

And this:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” — Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001

Stuart Taylor at the National Journal sums it up nicely.

So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.

Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.

Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

Now just watch. If GOP attacks her in any significant manner, they’ll be labeled as sexist and racist bigots.