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Sonia Sotomayor
[B]ecause I accept the proposition … that “to judge is an exercise of power,” and because … “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives—no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. 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.
— Federal judge Sonia Sotomayor, 2001.
A. Zarkov writes:
Today President Obama announced his nomination for the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor (Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) is best known for her 1995 injunction against major league baseball owners, effectively ending a baseball strike of nearly eight months. Less well known are her attitudes towards jurisprudence. In my opinion, her nomination demonstrates the absolute triumph of identity group politics in the United States, and naked aggression against white people, especially white men. I need not go any further than Sotomayor’s own words uttered at the Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture delivered at Berkeley Law School, which the New York Times discussed here.
Later Sotomayor published it in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, 13 Berkeley La Raza L.J. 87 (2002). [LA comments: that’s not a joke, there really is such a law journal.] La Raza (the race) is essentially a brown supremacist organization that has become extremely influential. Her choice to publish there tells us a lot about Sotomayor. The entire text of the speech, entitled, “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” was published a couple of weeks ago at the New York Times. Here are excepts:
I intend tonight to touch upon the themes that this conference will be discussing this weekend and to talk to you about my Latina identity, where it came from, and the influence I perceive it has on my presence on the bench….
Judge Reynoso [thrown off the bench by California voters in 1986], thank you for that lovely introduction. I am humbled to be speaking behind a man who has contributed so much to the Hispanic community. I am also grateful to have such kind words said about me….
No African-American, male or female, sits today on the Fourth or Federal circuits. And no Hispanics, male or female, sit on the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, District of Columbia or Federal Circuits. Sort of shocking, isn’t it? This is the year 2002. We have a long way to go…. [an obvious reference to the concept of institutional racism, where the only explanation for statistical disparities is racism even if no one can actually find it.]
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally.” [The judge has contradicted the central dogma of multiculturalism. Does she realize the implications of her statement?]
I warn Latinos in this room: Latinas are making a lot of progress in the old-boy network…. [Even Hispanic men should be wary.]
I would hope 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. [In short, I’m better than white men. This is why I call it naked aggression.]
Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives—no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. 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. [The mask is off. Judges don’t hear cases, they exercise power. Moreover there is no objective reality on viewpoints!]
[end of Sotomayer excerpts]
Obama may have made a mistake with this nomination. Stotomayor is either too arrogant or too stupid to realize the implications of her statements. She is pulling off the mask of liberalism to reveal the ugly, bigoted, anti-western, anti-white, and anti-male agenda. Let’s dig further.
From the New York Times article:
This month, for example, a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 that a “court of appeals is where policy is made.” She then immediately adds: “And I know—I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. O.K. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m—you know.”
The liberals have long claimed that the judges don’t practice “results-based jurisprudence,” where the judge starts off with the result and works backwards to create the argument justifying it. In other words, judges don’t make law and policy, they hear cases and interpret the laws and Constitution. Now Stotomayor is openly contradicting another liberal dogma. She fully admits, in public, that judges make policy and this is how she will act on the Supreme Court.
I hope my post will stimulate discussion on VFR. Sotomayor’s nomination is telling just how far Obama is willing to go: all the way.
- end of initial entry -
Larry G. writes:
“I would hope 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.” Sonia Sotomayor, quoted in the New York Times.
What exactly is this “richness of [Latina] experiences” of which she speaks? Being beaten by a husband? Being impregnated and abandoned by a boyfriend who also molested her daughter? Living ten persons to an apartment with relatives who all entered the US illegally? Failing an employment test and knowing—just knowing—that she was rejected because of her race, and not because she couldn’t correctly answer most of the questions? Or does it all come from knowing how to make enchiladas for dinner?
Multiculturalism has no place in the application of the law, before which we all stand equal to be judged by the same standards. Wife beating may be common where she comes from but that doesn’t mean it’s OK in America, even in “her” courtroom. None of this “experience” has any relevance whatsoever to the job of a judge, which is to apply the written law to the case at hand. But of course that isn’t what she wants to do. She wants to legislate from the bench, and use her affirmative action appointment by an affirmative action president to punish white men for her imagined grievances.
LA replies:
Re Larry G.’s quote of Sotomayor from the May 14 New York Times, even the Times indicated that it was problematic:
Her remarks, at the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, were not the only instance in which she has publicly described her view of judging in terms that could provoke sharp questioning in a confirmation hearing.
Notice that the Times did not say, “She said things that would give cynical and unprincipled Republicans an excuse to attack her.” The Times said that her repeatedly expressed views “could provoke sharp questioning.” One gets the impression that the Times was warning Obama not to nominate her.
LA continues:
Here’s the more typical way that the liberal media cover a leftist mistake, a headline in the May 24 New York Times:
“Guantanamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue”
The implication is that Republicans don’t oppose the closing of Guantanamo because they think it’s a bad idea; but that they will cynically manipulate Obama’s closing of it for partisan advantage.
The point is, the Times and the liberal media as a whole systematical refuse to grant that Republicans and conservatives have rational, good faith reasons for their positions. Their positions are only portrayed as driven by darkness, anger, restment, or cynicism. Such treatment is continuous, yet I’m not aware of Republicans and establishment conservatives ever protesting it.
Gintas writes:
Sotomayor said in her speech:
Judge Reynoso [thrown off the bench by California voters in 1986], thank you for that lovely introduction. I am humbled to be speaking behind a man who has contributed so much to the Hispanic community. I am also grateful to have such kind words said about me….
So she hangs with Reynoso? Birds of a feather… Reynoso was one of three judges (Reynoso, Joseph Grodin, and Rose Bird) who were removed—all at the same time—from the California Supreme Court by the voters in 1986, and I remember voting to pull the plug on these subversives who repeatedly overturned death sentences. Here’s a section on that vote.
Bird was the first Chief Justice to be removed from that office by a majority of the state’s voters. California justices are selected by the governor but must be regularly reconfirmed by the electorate; prior to Bird, no California appellate judge had ever failed such a vote.
She was removed in the November 4, 1986 election by a margin of 61 to 39 percent after a high-profile campaign that cited her categorical opposition to the death penalty. She reviewed a total of 64 capital cases appealed to the court. In each instance she issued a decision overturning the death penalty that had been imposed after the conviction. She was joined in her decision to overturn by at least three other members of the court in 61 of those cases. This led Bird’s critics to claim that she was substituting her own opinions and ideas for the laws and precedents upon which judicial decisions are supposed to be made. In addition, the Bird court struck down California’s “use a gun, go to jail” law that made a prison term mandatory for any crime in which the use of a gun was involved. The anti-Bird campaign ran television commercials featuring the children of the victims of the murderers whose sentences Bird and her fellow justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin had voted to reverse. In addition to Bird, Reynoso and Grodin were also voted off the seven justice California state supreme court bench. Justice Stanley Mosk, who often joined Bird, Reynoso, and Grodin, was not challenged nor were the other three justices.
As a result of the 1986 election, Governor George Deukmejian was able to appoint several conservative justices including new Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas and moved the court judicially more to the right and generally perceived as now having a more neutral-business and pro-law enforcement judicial philosophy.
[end of Wikipedia excerpt]
Alan Levine writes:
Seeing Sotomayor bloviating on TV reminded me of William Buckley’s comment a week after Lyndon Johnson became President: “National Review wishes to announce that its patience with President Johnson is exhausted.”
I wonder what the reaction would be if somebody suggested that being of English, or for that matter of Jewish descent, made one a better judge than someone who was black or “Hispanic,” although it is at least arguable that the former’s cultures have rather better records than others in matters of law and justice.
Of course I know what the reaction would be; we would never hear the end of the screaming.
By the way, what makes Sotomayor “nonwhite?” In my last semester, I had a student of pure Spanish descent who was darker than she is. For that matter, I’ve dated Jewish women of about that hue!
Trevor H. writes:
What we have heard from Sotomayor is extremely disturbing. If anything can lead this country to real civil unrest, it is the transformation of the judiciary from a principled and disinterested group impartially interpreting and synthesizing the law, to a tribalistic, factionalistic, even racist, group which blatantly gives preference to one party over another for reasons of race, politics, sympathy, personal experience, etc.
As an attorney and former engineer, I believe that the common law system is one of the greatest creations of Man, and believe that it has been of extreme importance to our progress as a civilization.
If politics and factionalism, petty agendas, etc., are allowed to penetrate the judiciary, everything will fall apart. The legitimacy of the law will be nil, because regardless of its seeming impartiality on paper, it will be unfairly applied to individual cases. All respect will be lost for Judges, and soon thereafter, for the whole judicial system.
What Sotomayor is talking about is nothing less than upending the fundamental, bedrock principle of our judiciary, which is impartiality. The implication is dire. For example, why should any judge recuse himself in cases of potential partiality, if being partial to a particular racial or cultural cause is believed to improve their decisionmaking?
I think our Republic can survive a lot of things, but it cannot survive this. Our law would devolve into racial and class battles, with judges simply taking sides. The legislature would mean little, because the meaning of its laws would commonly be changed beyond all recognition. If this idea took hold, the obvious next step would be to require that each panel of judges be representative of all races and cultures and factions of society—a mere battle of factions, rule by “hispanic women” rather than a rule of law.
But she goes even further by rejecting even the capacity of white men, or anyone for that matter, to be fair and impartial. This is just so insidious and disturbing, I am at a loss.
LA replies:
I share your consternation. But let us remember that thinking such as Sotomayor’s has been current in the elite law schools and liberal bench for twenty or thirty years. She herself has been a federal appeals court judge for some years. So the catastrophe you’re describing has, in principle, already happened. It’s just spreading and becoming more noticeable now.
LA adds:
I don’t want to sound as though I’m understating the badness of this. A Hispanic racialist, with a Hispanic racialist judicial agenda, has been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her philosophy plainly disqualifies her, and the Republicans must fight her nomination with everything they have.
[Note: Joseph C.’s comments and my replies have been copied into a separate entry entitled: “The shocking truth: To assimilate into America means to accept the laws and culture of white people.”]
Joseph C. writes:
The abomination of Sonia Sotamayor to the Supreme Court, while disturbing, is not surprising to anyone who has followed Barack Hussein Obama’s career path and paid attention to his statements. What does surprise me is how the Republicans are “shocked, shocked” at some of her views.
The error that many faux conservatives make is one of omission. They state that a judge should apply “the law” evenly, that a judge should “interpret the Constitution” impartially, should not read their personal preferences into “our jurisprudence.” Of course, they never complete the thought—whether discussing affirmative action, judicial philosophy, etc.
The missing part of the statement, which many “conservatives” believe goes without saying, is that “the law,” “the Constitution” and “our jurisprudence” does not exist in a vacuum. It is the product of an Anglo Saxon culture from the dawn of the American Revolution times. Sadly, this does not go without saying, because unless it is said—and said again and again and again and again—it will not be understood. And true conservatives should not only state this but embrace it.
Yes, the role of an American judge is to interpret laws according to the Constitution—the Constitution written by white Anglo Saxon Protestant Northern Europeans in the 1700s. Yes, judges should apply the law—the law as written by white Anglo Saxon Protestant Northern Europeans in the 1700s, and as subsequently amended by a more diverse (but still predominantly white ) majority culture. True, a judge’s personal preferences have no place in our jurisprudence—meaning that nobody is qualified to be a judge if they are not going to follow the jurisprudence established by white Anglo Saxon Protestant Northern Europeans in the 1700s and maintained by a white majority culture.
When Obama speaks of “empathy,” what he really means is he wants a judge who will not be bound by a white man’s Constitution. In his words, he wants someone who understands what it is like to be a single mom, a minority, gay, handicapped, etc. What this translates into is that Obama wants a judge who knows what it is like to be a minority in a culture ruled by a majority, and will interpret the law from the viewpoint of a minority. Someone who will ignore the rules because they do not feel bound to uphold the white man’s rules. And when liberals speak of “institutional racism,” what they mean is that it is not enough for everyone to be judged equally according to “the law” because “the law” was written by only one segment of the population (in this case, white Anglo Saxon Protestant Northern Europeans in the 1700s).
Earlier in this thread, Larry G. asks:
“What exactly is this ‘richness of [Latina] experiences’ of which she speaks? Being beaten by a husband? Being impregnated and abandoned by a boyfriend who also molested her daughter? Living ten persons to an apartment with relatives who all entered the U.S. illegally? Failing an employment test and knowing—just knowing—that she was rejected because of her race, and not because she couldn’t correctly answer most of the questions? Or does it all come from knowing how to make enchiladas for dinner?”
The answer is—all that and more. Her experience consists solely of being a non-white viewing the law written by white people through the prism of a non-white. That was her prime qualification. In fact, I would guess it was her only qualification.
If there is one question worth asking this cretin during her confirmation hearings, it is this: “Judge Sotamayor, you took an oath to uphold our Constitution. That Constitution was written by people of a different gender, background, and experience than your own. Do you feel that you could uphold laws written by people so different from you, regardless of the impact of those laws on you and people like you? Do you, a resident of a white majority culture, feel obligated to uphold laws written by dead, rich white men, even though you are not white nor a man?”
LA replies:
This is an original comment. Many conservatives would be horrified by Joseph’s argument, and would cry out, “Our law has nothing to do with race!” But Joseph is not saying that our law has to do with race. He’s saying that the left and the minorities are saying that the law has to do with race. He’s saying that they are hostile to our laws and Constitution, and seek to overturn our laws and Constitution, because our laws and Constitution were written by white men.
His comment thus brilliantly pinpoints the combination of concrete particularism and neutral proceduralism that characterizes America. Yes, this country was formed by whites—specifically Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. And they formed, over generations, an impersonal, non-tribal justice system under which people of all backgrounds would be treated equally under the law. But the fact that the law is procedurally neutral and race-blind, doesn’t mean that the conditions that allow for such a system to exist are race blind. Change America into a brown and black country, and that new population will not only not have much regard for that impersonal, non-tribal system of justice, because they themselves are tribal, but they will seek to overthrow that system of justice, along with all other historical aspects of America, because they were made by whites whom the nonwhites are now replacing. From which it follows that to maintain its universalist and impersonal system of justice, America must remain a particularist, predominantly white country.
Gintas writes:
That New Haven fireman case, Ricci, which is before the Supreme Court right now? Guess who helped dismiss the discrimination case brought by the white firemen? You bet she hates whites, tribally helping out her race, which is probably why Obama picked her.
Richard S. writes:
Why should Judge Sotomayer aspire to impartiality when it’s so much more natural, so much more “authentic” to be partial?
LA replies:
Well put!
Indeed, why should she?
That states it so simply.
Joseph C. replies to LA:
Thank you—as always—for your kind words.
Though my comment deals with the Sotomayor nomination and what it says about America as a white majority culture, it is—in a larger sense—relevant to all cultures. Any peoples that form a society will as their first order of business establish rules and customs which govern that society. At bottom, all societies are institutions whereby people come together and agree—voluntarily—to be bound by certain laws and customs. This is true of Europeans in Americans, villages in China, tribes in Africa, English in Australia, etc.
As peoples migrate—either in search of opportunity or to escape undesirable conditions in their fatherland—they find themselves in other societies, societies which were created by peoples different from them. In some cases, very different. They soon find their options limited because they are being forced—in the words of Obama—to “play on another man’s court by another man’s rules.” Eventually, when they are joined by enough of their own kind, they form their own alliances and start agitating for change, meaning that the host society—which they voluntarily joined—should change its rules and customs to allow them to achieve equality of result. They are not willing to be judged by the same laws as everyone else, because those laws work to the advantage of the majority population.
In more backward societies, their claims are either ignored or rudely suppressed. In advanced societies—like the U.S. and other Western nations—their claims find a sympathetic ear among the existing majority. The majority goes along at first to maintain comity, but eventually the demands become so great—and the population so diverse—that the majority surrenders its very identity.
I do not say this to argue for the primacy of one culture. Indeed, I acknowledge that any outsiders would find themselves at a disadvantage trying to advance in an alien culture. Imagine, for example, if a person from a middle class background in Western European country, or a Japanese businessman, were transported to Tanzania, given a wooden spear, and asked to take down a Cape Buffalo. They wouldn’t last five minutes—not because they are inferior or stupid, but because their background was ill-suited to hunting the most vicious animal on the planet. What would they do? Form a political action committee and ask the tribal elders to give them a head start, on the grounds that it would be unfair to expect them to hunt as well as the native? Ask the Cape Buffalo to give them one free shot? If that sounds ridiculous, imagine how ridiculous I think it sounds when I hear people—of any background—complain that the American culture reflects a white, male, European perspective.
I have often heard liberals complain that “the law” is an artificial social construct, erected by the majority to suppress those out of power. And to that I say “of course. All societies choose how to govern themselves, and it is entirely proper that those choices will reflect the preferences of those that established the society in the first place. In America, that is the Anglo Saxon, Protestant, Northern European culture. ” (As an aside, I write this as a non-Anglo Saxon Catholic.) The existing population built the society, wrote its laws, established its customs, and in many cases they (or their ancestors) fought and died in its wars. Who else has any right to decide how that society should be governed?
I firmly believe that people have a right to govern themselves as they see fit—and, to expect others who join their society to consent to be governed by their rules, no questions asked. Even blacks, many (though not all) of whom came to the U.S. involuntarily, owe their ultimate freedom and subsequent advancement to the values of the white majority American culture. Certainly anyone else who comes here—for whatever reason—should be bound by our culture. That it is not to say America is only for White Europeans. But it is to say that America is only for people who are willing—without question or complaint—to live under laws written by White Europeans. And, accordingly, the immigration debate will always have a racialist component. Demography is destiny—and in a representative society with universal suffrage the only way to maintain one’s culture is to limit membership to those who are naturally inclined to the culture in the first place.
To put the question to the neo-cons and love-the-world Americans bluntly: Do you really believe that you can allow anyone in the world to come to America, given them the right to vote, and that they will continue to elect politicians that enforce the cultures and standards of White Europeans? Larry, what would horrify many conservative about my comment would not be the racial aspect, even if they understood the impersonal justice that I advocate. What horrifies them is the term “our culture.” Liberals (and most conservatives) do not believe any society has a right to exist, that any people has a right to call a part of the earth “theirs,” to write laws, exclude others, etc. They understand the implications of my posting all too well. THAT is what troubles them.
LA replies:
There’s more here than I can absorb and reply to at the moment, but just on one point, you wrote:
“To put the question to the neo-cons and love-the-world Americans bluntly: Do you really believe that you can allow anyone in the world to come to America, given them the right to vote, and that they will continue to elect politicians that enforce the cultures and standards of White Europeans?”
At a small luncheon in New York City in 1994 where John Tanton was the guest speaker on immigration, and Peter Brimelow and Midge Decter were among those present, Decter went into the usual song about how no one thought that Jews could assimilate to the Anglo-Saxon culture, and then Leon Edel wrote the definitive biography of Henry James, showing that Jews could assimilate to the Anglo-Saxon culture at its highest level.
I asked her: “Do you think that Hmong and Mexicans and Muslims will assimilate to the culture of Henry James”?
She instantly and forcefully replied: “Yes.”
The absurdity of her answer was so palpable to me, and I thought to everyone else at the table, that I didn’t bother saying anything more, I felt the case had been made. However, in retrospect, I should have kept pushing, pinning her down on the idiocy of what she had said.
LA adds (May 28):
Here I think is the key passage in Joseph’s followup comment:
That it is not to say America is only for White Europeans. But it is to say that America is only for people who are willing—without question or complaint—to live under laws written by White Europeans. And, accordingly, the immigration debate will always have a racialist component. Demography is destiny—and in a representative society with universal suffrage the only way to maintain one’s culture is to limit membership to those who are naturally inclined to the culture in the first place.
This is very good, and it also reminds me of an article I wrote for Academic Questions in the 1990s (unfortunately not online at present), “America: Multiethnic, not Multicultural,” in which I said that the key to maintaining a common American identity was identification with the original Anglo-Saxon people who formed America.
Sebastian writes:
This piece (near the end) has a few examples of the good judge’s “empathy.” Seems like leftist boilerplate opinion with an urban, Hispanic hue. Everything she does will be predictable and follow the leftist curriculum of elite law schools, i.e. it will be a complete rejection of common law jurisprudence and the Socratic quest for impartial truth. More interesting is that she was first appointed to the bench by…George Bush the elder. Perfect!
BTW, Joseph C’s comment is spot on, precisely what I uncovered discussing politics and jurisprudence with liberal students at law school. Behind all the sophisticated arguments and complicated legal theories, it comes down to a conscious rejection of “a white man’s Constitution.” Dig deeper and this is what it’s all about for them.
Alan Levine writes:
Seeing Sotomayor bloviating on TV reminded me of William Buckley’s comment a week after Lyndon Johnson became President: “National Review wishes to announce that its patience with President Johnson is exhausted.”
May 27
Jim C. writes:
“There is only one answer. Hispanic and all non-Western immigration should be stopped. Laws against illegal immigration and employment of illegal aliens should be enforced so that illegals will stop entering this country and those already here will depart. All multicultural and linguistic accommodations to Hispanics and other non-Western peoples in our midst should cease. And the country should tell its Hispanics that you either accept the American system, or you don’t belong here.”
You are of course (mainly) correct—but what if these non-Western peoples were Chinese and Japanese?
At its root, black and Hispanic antiwhite sentiment floes from their inability to compete with whites, especially for elite positions. From what I can discern from Sotomayor’s oeuvre, she lacks the talent to be a decent real estate litigator—never mind a Supreme Court justice. NAMs (Non-Asian minorities) just can’t compete—so we end up with Oscar nominees named Spike and Nobel laureates named Toni—ie, mediocrities.
I think the way to frame this debate against Sotomayor’s nomination (aside: is it wise to oppose a stupid liberal who will be made to look like a moron next to Roberts and Scalia?) is to demonstrate that Sotomayor is stupid, and that “critical race theory” is what the stupidos like Soto and Obama took to “earn” their magnas.
Brilliant like Spike Lee. Brilliant like Sonia Sotomayor.
May 28 Steven Warshawsky writes:
Sotomayor fits the Obama presidency in the same way that Ginsburg fit the Clinton presidency. The move from Ginsburg to Sotomayor parallels the move from Clinton to Obama. We see a progression of leftism from 1960s liberalism, which retained a sense of American identity (for all his faults, Clinton is recognizably “American”), to contemporary multiculturalism (Obama’s American identity is open to question). Ideologically, this is a transition from a movement ostensibly dedicated to “perfecting” America’s founding ideals of liberty and equality (for women, blacks, etc.) to an openly radical project to remake the United States into a multi-ethnic “tribal” state. [LA replies: I think Clinton was quite openly undermining America.]
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 26, 2009 04:34 PM | Send
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