Sonia's got it with baseball, what about the rest?
Let's start with the good news - apparently Sonia Sotomayor is a New York Yankees fan.
Bronx-born and bred, how could she not be?
Her continued loyalty to the home team speaks volumes about her sense of judgment and clarity of thinking, and goes a long way towards relieving doubts that might creep in when you take a slightly closer look at her judicial record.
Sotomayor, who is currently a federal appeals court judge, has been nominated by President Barack Obama to replace retiring Justice David Souter. Her nomination has already received widespread coverage in the media, which will only grow in depth and intensity as the Congressional hearings on her qualifications approach and get
underway. But since Vermont has a seat at the table in the form of Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee which will recommendation (or not) Sotomayer for her spot on the nation's highest Court of Law, we'll throw in our two cents for the fun of it.
All Supreme Court appointments are political to some degree or another. That's simply a fact of life and it's been that way for a long time. With luck, we also get a qualified jurist as well, and the track record, overall, hasn't been bad. If you reach that level of
being on the short list for a Supreme Court nomination, you can't be that incompetent.
Unfortunately, competency and qualifications for the post aren't the only factors that come into play. For at least the past 20 years, and maybe longer - certainly since the shameful decision not to approve the nomination of the highly qualified Robert Bork to be a Supreme Court Justice on highly partisan political grounds - politics and
ideology have come into play as never before. One of the leaders of the charge against Bork was none other than the current Vice President, Joseph Biden. From the left and the right, both sides have been obsessed with how nominees would vote on the abortion issue and whether or not they would uphold Roe v. Wade. It's hard to imagine
that once upon a time, nominations for the Supreme Court were so low key that the nominees rarely even showed up in person to testify, nor were expected to.
Sonia Sotomayor seems on the surface to be a well-qualified jurist and certainly has the requisite experience one would expect for a candidate for the nation's highest court. We think that should really be the central issue. It's all well and good that she will be the
first Hispanic justice, and the third woman, but those facts are distinctly secondary to whether or not her judicial track record to date is solid.
We're a little troubled by the notion of "empathy" that has surrounded Sotomayor's appointment, played up by the President himself. It's fine that judges should have "empathy." It's even better that Sotomayor has stated she is concerned about the
practical, real-world consequences of her decisions. But in the end, it's about interpreting the Constitution and arriving at legal decisions based on precedents.
We're highly troubled by one decision Sotomayor had a role in that involved a discrimination suit by 18 firemen from New Haven, Conn against that municipality. It grew out of a decision by that city to void the results of a job promotion exam because no African-Americans had scored high enough to qualify for a promotion. The 18 firemen
argued they had passed the test fair and square and their qualifications were being thwarted because the right outcome, by the city's estimation, hadn't occurred. The case went up the appeals ladder, and Sotomayor was a member of a three-judge panel that upheld a lower court ruling that found in favor of New Haven, and against
the firemen. In one of those delicious ironies of history, the case in now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments last month.
We're sorry, but we live in a meritocracy, or we should be, and if the 18 firemen were the best qualified for the job promotions, then that should have been the end of the story, unless someone could prove the test was blatantly slanted to disadvantage minority groups, which to the best of our knowledge, has not been alleged.
Sotomayor may have had an "inspiring" life story, an up from the ghetto journey that saw her rise through sheer native intelligence and hard work to the top of her classes at Princeton University and Yale Law School. She may well deserve a seat on the Supreme Court.
But we hope that before she is finished testifying before Leahy's Judiciary committee, the honorable Senators quiz her a bit about her thinking in the case involving the 18 New Haven firefighters, and make sure that she is clear that it's about more than just "empathy."