Profile of a Judicial Activist: Supreme Court Nominee Judge Sotomayor

Judge Sonia Sotomayor Fact Sheet

Supreme Court Nominee

 The Judicial Confirmation Network recently released an open memo concerning Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The memo is produced below or you can find it here.

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·       President Obama has threatened to nominate liberal judicial activists who will indulge their left-wing policy preferences instead of neutrally applying the law.  In selecting Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court nominee, President Obama has carried out his threat.

 ·     Judge Sotomayor will allow her feelings and personal politics to stand in the way of basic fairness.  In a recent case, Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with a city that used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters.  The per curiam opinion Sotomayor joined went so far out of its way to bury the firefighters’ important claims of unfair treatment that her colleague, Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her.

According to Judge Carbranes, Sotomayor's opinion "contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case" and its "perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal." Even the liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen expressed disappointment with the case, stating, "Ricci is not just a legal case but a man who has been deprived of the pursuit of happiness on account of race."

Sotomayor's terrible decision in Ricci is under review by the Supreme Court and an opinion is expxpected by the end of June.

The poor quality of Sotomayor’s decisions is reflected in her terrible record of reversals by the Supreme Court.

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Sotomayor is a favorite of far left special interest groups.  In addition to her record as a hard left judicial activist, Sotomayor has been recommended for the Supreme Court by Nan Aron of the very liberal Alliance for Justice, who stated in a 2004 memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sotomayor had “been through an initial vetting and fit into the criteria that we believe should be the standard for any Supreme Court justice.”

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In response to claims that Sotomayor is a bipartisan pick because Bush 41 appointed her to the district court:  President George H.W. Bush nominated Sotomayor in 1991 only because the New York senators had forced on the White House a deal that enabled Senator Moynihan to name one of every four district-court nominees in New York. In 1998, 29 Republican senators voted against President Clinton’s nomination of Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.]

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      Additionally, as pointed out by Jeffrey Rosen in his article " The Case Against Sotomayor",

. "  She is a rule-bound pragmatist--very geared toward determining what the right answer is and what the law dictates, but her general approach is, unsurprisingly, influenced by her unique background," says one former clerk. "She grew up in a situation of disadvantage, and was able, by virtue of the system operating in such a fair way, to accomplish what she did. I think she sees the law as an instrument that can accomplish the same thing for other people, a system that, if administered fairly, can give everyone the fair break they deserve, regardless of who they are."

·     When commented upon by liberal legal experts, the most consistent concern was that Sotomayer, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.

·     Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

·     Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel's opinion that contained "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case." (The extent of Sotomayor's involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)

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Video Clips

Judge Sonia Sotomayor: Court is Where Policy is Made

Sonia Sotomayor: Courts make policy full clip

Karl Rove on Sonia Sotomayor (2:16)

Obama selects Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court

Supreme Court Appointment Up For Sale Or Repayment of Favors !!!

Sonia Sotomayor, Pace Law School Annual Commencement, May 18,

Robert Gibbs On The Supreme Court Lets One Slip