Sonia Sotomayor Lied In Her Confirmation Hearings

Via-SayAnythingBlog.com

This is from Sonia Sotomayor, responding to a question about her stance on 2nd amendment rights during the Senate confirmation hearings for her appointment to the Supreme Court:

I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller.

She’s referring to the DC vs. Heller case which recognized gun rights as individual rights and declared unconstitutional the federal ban on firearms in Washington DC. But in the McDonald vs. Chicago case, which extended Heller to a state-level gun ban, Sotomayor joined the dissent saying:

In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense.

I think the framers themselves, per their writings contemporaneous to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, would disagree with Sotomayor.

But then, Sotomayor disagrees with herself. Yet, she’ll be on the Supreme Court for at least the next couple of decades.

Which makes me wonder why we even have nomination hearings for these appointments. The nominee is almost never denied approval. The nominee’s usually misrepresent themselves, their politics, their judicial philosophy and their backgrounds.

It seems as though there’s no point, other than to provide a stage for more of the ceaseless political theater we get out of Washington DC.

Discrimination: From Equality To Payback

Via- IBD

By THOMAS SOWELL

Back when I was on the receiving end of racial discrimination, it was to me not simply a personal misfortune, or even the misfortune of a race, it was a moral outrage. But not everyone who went through such an experience sees it that way.

When it comes to subjecting other people to the same treatment in a later era, some have no real problem with that. They see it as payback.

One of the many problems of the payback approach is that many of the people who most deserve retribution are no longer alive. You can take symbolic revenge on people who look like them, but this removes the whole moral element.

If it is all right to discriminate today against individuals who have done you no harm, then why was it wrong to discriminate against you in the past?

These are not just abstract questions. These are serious, real-world questions, especially when considering someone to be given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Some judicial nominees have had racial bias attributed to them, despite their years of unwavering support of civil rights for all — Judge Robert Bork and Judge Charles Pickering being striking examples. But the current Supreme Court nominee is the first in decades to explicitly introduce racial differences in their own words, along with the claim that their own racial or ethnic background makes them better qualified.

Attempts to claim that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's words were isolated remarks — a slip of the tongue "taken out of context" — have now been discredited by further information showing that she has repeatedly expressed the same ideas, in virtually the same words, at other times and in other contexts.

Moreover, her deeds — including years of participation in group identity politics — are perfectly consistent with her words. So too was her vote on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to summarily dismiss the appeal of white firefighters who did not get the promotions they had earned by passing a required test, because not enough minority firefighters passed to provide racial "diversity."

The Supreme Court of the United States found that appeal worth hearing, even if Judge Sotomayor did not.

The warm and genial image of Sotomayor presented on television, during President Obama's introduction and afterwards, is in sharp contrast with what attorneys who have appeared before her in court have said.

A poll of such attorneys showed them rating her worse than other judges in her treatment of those who appeared before her. A tape of Judge Sotomayor's abusive behavior in court backed up the attorneys' picture. It is also consistent with someone in payback mode.

A confirmation decision on a Supreme Court nominee is not like deciding whether someone is innocent or guilty of a crime. It is right in criminal cases that the burden of proof is on those making an accusation, and that the accusation be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Judge Sotomayor is not in jeopardy of either criminal or civil penalties. So there is no reason why either the criminal standard or proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" or the civil standard of "the preponderance of evidence" is required for determining whether she is the right person to be given a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land.

It is hundreds of millions of Americans — current and future — whose fundamental rights are at stake whenever any nominee is being considered for the Supreme Court of the United States. It is the American people as a whole who are entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

One of those fundamental rights was taken away just four years ago, when a 5-to-4 decision by the Supreme Court gave local politicians the right to seize your home or business and turn the property over to some other private party that they favor. Just one vote on the Supreme Court can make a huge difference.

We have been told endlessly about Sonia Sotomayor's biography and her symbolism as a Hispanic woman. Is that enough to risk millions of other Americans' fundamental rights?

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The Make Believe Sotomayor

Via-American Thinker

While Democrats have exaggerated her background, burnished her career, and misrepresented her philosophy to seek approval from the court of public opinion, Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been equally misleading about herself. As more of her words from the past begin to surface, it has become apparent that who she really is and who she portrays herself to be aren't the same person.

Sotomayor's biography is purported to be one of a deprived and disadvantaged Latina who conquered the odds. A National Journal report raises questions on the extremity of what she claims to have overcome:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University's Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school's valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.... My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak."

[emphasis mine]


First, how does one enter Cardinal Spellman High School, a college preparatory setting with a majority White American student body, and emerge as valedictorian despite a deficiency in writing proper English? Additionally, we're to believe that with such a deficiency she still managed to receive a full scholarship from Princeton? If her story were true, then surely someone else would have been valedictorian of her class and students more qualified than she would have gone to Princeton.


Second, what kind of Spanish did Sotomayor learn? A declaration that the language doesn't possess adjectives calls her proficiency to question. Each Latin American culture speaks a variant of the language that contains its own respective jerga --slang-- and she claims to speak the language "fairly well." But The language uses various types of adjectives and classifies them into two groups, calificativos and determinativos, and the application is similar to English, answering the questions which, what kind, how many, and whose. Sotomayor couldn't have been addressing a Spanish-speaking audience because they would have immediately taken notice of such a perplexing statement.


Apparently, the goal was to highlight her achievements despite the feigned disadvantage she attributes to her self-characterized "Latina background". Sotomayor has rightfully labeled herself a Nuyorican because she is an American of Puerto Rican ancestry born and bred in New York City, but her words appear to be more akin to a Puerto Rican born and bred in the mountains of Naranjito who migrates to the states and consequently has to overcome the economic, cultural, and social barriers an unfamiliar America would present.


Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for Sotomayor to just be an exceptional American, she needed the appearance of a deprived and disadvantaged Latina in addition to look even more exceptional, as an unlikely-to-succeed individual.


Sotomayor's juggling act continued on Wednesday while meeting with Senators on Capital Hill to defend her now infamous 32 word "wise Latina" statement from the hortatory speech she gave at Berkeley in 2001.


Faced with having to explain her statement of superiority to white Senators who hold the key to her historic appointment, she backpedaled by dismissing her proclamation as a "poor choice of words". But let's be honest here. There has been ample time for her to clarify her statement prior to her nomination, but in the same fashion of the nominees to the president's cabinet that owed back taxes, she didn't feel it was necessary to right the wrong until it was professionally expedient for her to do so.


Ultimately, she believes what she said, and the disingenuousness of her clarification is underscored by the fact that she made virtually the same statement in a speech given seven years prior to Berkeley. Why has the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor been marred by blatant dishonesty?


While it has been disgusting to watch Democrats use her as a pawn with the hopes of grasping the allegiance of the Latino voting bloc, the nominee herself has exhibited a level of dishonesty that is alarming, especially given that she is a judge, not a politician.


Sotomayor has overreached in her quest to prove just how much of a Latina she is, and at the same time demonstrate how much she's had to overcome because she is a Latina. It's as if for her being a Latina is some sort of pharmacon, one that has helped her move forward, but also at times kept her behind.


Sotomayor's behavior is troubling because there was already reason to question her performance as a jurist. But now her integrity also has to be called into question when she's caught exaggerating her biography and backpedaling on her philosophy solely to enhance her profile and advance her career.


Any jurist should be above question when it comes to honesty and forthrightness. All the more so for a jurist on our most powerful court.

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