Thread: Sotomayor's aversion to impartiality {says text is worse...}

This is an interesting editorial to have at the ready if someone is stating that once you read the whole 'Latina better' text her statement makes more sense. Steve Chapman disagrees. Note: this is from a Chicago paper.


Sotomayor's aversion to impartiality

Steve Chapman
May 31, 2009

The chief blot on Sonia Sotomayor's otherwise stellar professional record is a comment she made deprecating the capabilities of any judge lacking a Y chromosome and Iberian ancestry.

"I would hope," she said in a 2001 lecture on law and multicultural diversity, "that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

The question for her supporters is: How do we spin that? It's not sufficient grounds to reject her nomination, given her excellent credentials. But it's still an embarrassment.

One possible way to handle it is a mea culpa by the nominee. She could say, "Let me explain what I meant to say," or "I used to believe that, but I now realize I was mistaken," or "Oh, man -- what was I thinking?" Any of those tactics would defuse the controversy and allow the debate to proceed to a topic more advantageous to her.

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Maybe when she gets to her confirmation hearing, Sotomayor will disavow the remark. The White House says she made a poor choice of words. But President Obama, in his Saturday radio address, accused her critics of "pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor's record."

Sotomayor, her supporters point out, also said judges "must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate."

They have a point. Anyone who reads the whole speech will indeed find that her comment wasn't as bad as it sounds. It was worse.

What is clear from the full text is that her claim to superior insight was not a casual aside or an exercise in devil's advocacy. On the contrary, it fit neatly into her overall argument, which was that the law can only benefit from the experiences and biases that female and minority judges bring with them.

She clearly thinks impartiality is overrated. "The aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others," she declared, a bit dismissively. She doesn't seem to think it's terribly important to try to meet the aspiration.

That's apparent from the context. She said, "Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge [Miriam] Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging."

In more succinct terms: Sotomayor does not mind, and may even prefer, that the outcomes of cases are affected by the gender and race of the judge (at least when the judge is not white and male).

Judge Cedarbaum, she noted, "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law." Does Sotomayor share that noble sentiment? Not entirely.

"Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum's aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society [my emphasis]." Which comes alarmingly close to saying: It's impossible for female and minority judges to overcome their biases, and it would be a shame if they did.

Underlying all this is Sotomayor's suspicion that white male judges are bound to treat minorities and women unfairly. She pointed out that "wise men like [Justice] Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice [Benjamin] Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case."

Sotomayor didn't seem to notice the damage she had just done to her own argument. The Supreme Court that upheld that gender discrimination claim was composed of nine men -- just as the court that ordered an end to racial segregation in public schools was all-white.

The court that upheld affirmative action by public universities had only one black member. There were no women on the court that found constitutional protection for abortion rights.

Right or wrong, the justices in those cases clearly strove to put aside their narrow personal interests and uphold the fundamental principles of the Constitution as best they could. Most Americans, most lawyers and most judges, I would guess, believe that's exactly what judges should do. Why doesn't Sonia Sotomayor?

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman schapman@tribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/colu ... 044.column

Here is another Chicago opinion piece;


Motion to Sotomayor: Race shouldn't matter

John Kass
May 29, 2009

What would happen if I began a column about the corrosive effects of government-sanctioned racism with the following idiotic idea?

"I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than an African-American or Latino who hasn't lived that life."

If I wrote such nonsense, I'd be denounced as a racist. And President Barack Obama would never nominate me to the Supreme Court.

But Obama did nominate Sonia Sotomayor to the court. In 2001, while giving a lecture on the law and cultural diversity at the University of California in Berkeley, Sotomayor declared race and gender "may and will make a difference in our judging."

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She aimed at a belief expressed by Supreme Court justices that a wise old woman and a wise old man would reach the same conclusion in deciding the law.

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," Sotomayor said.

Jeepers. If I'd written that with the races reversed, they'd send me to a racial sensitivity training session and give me a rat cage to wear on my head.

Though I am deathly afraid of rats, I'd try to tell the sensitivity committee what most Americans believe: That the Constitution is colorblind, and skin pigment has nothing to do with wisdom.

And that a government that uses race to pick winners and losers -- while enforcing such policy through the courts and calling it fair -- is a government that infects its people with a corrosive and debilitating cynicism.

That's probably the time when the rat would be released. But after the training session, they'd take the cage from my head. Then they'd fire me.

That's not the worst of it. The worst is that Obama would never get to tell my compelling narrative: how my father plowed the fields outside his village in Greece with a mean, bowlegged mule named Truman, a mule that happened to be a white mule.

And that later, as immigrants on a waiter's salary, my parents purchased for their children a subscription to the Chicago Tribune and the complete "My Book House Books" collection, unwittingly condemning their eldest to the madness of a writer's life.

The Sonia Sotomayor debate is now open, offered up by the first African-American president, whose campaign promised to lead us into the undiscovered precincts of a post-racial America.

Sotomayor's qualifications as a first-rate intellect are not in question. But there are at least two sides here worth exploring.

First, there is the Inspiring Icon of the White House narrative, the Latina born in the Bronx, raised by her widowed mom who sacrificed everything for her daughter. With smarts and guts, Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law School, only to have her impeccable qualifications questioned by a prospective employer who'd been conditioned by race-based government policy to wonder if she'd made it that far only because of her Hispanic heritage.

She's rightfully a beacon of hope to every Latina mother and daughter, from the Bronx to Chicago's Little Village and on to East L.A. The girls in the neighborhoods can see Sotomayor and aspire to greatness.

But the other side of the story also speaks to racism. Not the knuckle-dragging kind shrieked by ignorant barbarians. That's easy to condemn, whether the knuckles are white, black or brown.

Yet there is another kind. The media don't recognize it as racism and instead lard it with virtue, calling it by its Orwellian name: affirmative action. Yet many know it by what it is: government-backed racial preference.

Sotomayor was part of a three-member federal panel that reviewed the reverse-discrimination case of 17 white firefighters and one Latino firefighter from New Haven, Conn. They scored high on the promotions test, but the city voided the promotions because not enough African-Americans scored well enough.

"We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration," the judges said in dismissing the case in a one-paragraph ruling, adding that the firefighters didn't have a "viable" claim under the law.

And so Sotomayor reaffirms racial preference. But imagine you're a judge in a burning building. At the moment of fire and flesh, would you care about the color of the hands that save you?

The other day, I wrote about a Chicago physician left for dead by a hit-and-run driver. Responding paramedics saved his life. By properly bracing his broken neck, they prevented lifelong paralysis.

But I foolishly never thought to ask about their race, only their competence. How stupid of me. Judge Sotomayor would think me most unwise.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/colu ... 602.column

WOW!! If the liberal Tribune is printing this, she is going to have a hard time getting confirmed.

Sotomayor declared race and gender "may and will make a difference in our judging."

That is scary. The interpretation of the Constitution in cases is all the Supreme Court should do. No, the justices are not automatons but for anyone to suggest that their "richness" of experience (what? The other justices had no rich experiences?) and race and gender "may and WILL make a difference in our judging" brings to mind Limbaugh's description of femmiNazis. She is not someone I would trust to represent the law, since I may be of the same gender, but apparently of the wrong race to bring a case in front of her.

The courts duty is to interpret the law.

Dixie

Bowman wrote:

WOW!! If the liberal Tribune is printing this, she is going to have a hard time getting confirmed.

Unfortunately, I think she'll breeze through the process without a hitch. The Senate Republican's are afraid of making too much of a stink, and I can't say that I blame them.