[Bret L]

My Questions For Sotomayor—Will Republicans Dare Ask Them?

By Steve Sailer

"The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are currently scheduled to begin this Monday, July 13.

The Democrats want to rush Sotomayor through with merely some
celebrations of her Hispanicness, and no tough questioning. For
example, these will be the first Supreme Court nominee hearings in
decades that National Public Radio, that adjunct of the Obama
Administration, won’t broadcast live.

Some Republican Senators have been talking about trying to postpone
the hearings until September, claiming that they need more time to
review her complex record.

In reality, Sotomayor’s record isn’t all that complicated. It consists
of two parts.

* Her legal opinions are those of a grind: not brilliant, but not
so lame that you couldn’t imagine her as one of the dimmer bulbs on
the Supreme Court.

Of course, the problem with being on the Court of Appeals (like
Sotomayor at present) is that if you indulge your political biases too
much, you’ll get embarrassingly overruled by the Supreme Court (as
Sotomayor got overturned on the Ricci v. DeStefano case).

Once you are on the Supreme Court, however, you are (effectively)
above the law. So past opinions you’ve written are of less predictive
value about how you will rule when unfettered than your off-hours
volunteering.

And this is the second part of Sotomayor’s record:

* She has devoted an extraordinary amount of her non-judicial
efforts to demanding ethnic preferences to benefit her group and—need
it be said?—herself.

Racial preferences have been very, very good to Sonia Sotomayor. And
it would be only natural for her to be very, very good to preferences
when she’s on the Supreme Court.

Obviously, Sotomayor is going to be approved. The Democrats have 60
Senators and she only needs 50.

And many Republican Senators would no doubt like to fold quietly, what
with, as we are constantly told in the media, Hispanics accounting for
nine percent of the vote according to exit polls in 2008. (Actually,
the Hispanic share of the vote in 2008 turned out to be, according to
the gold standard Census Bureau survey of 50,000 households, only 7.4
percent, but who cares about reality?)

The tactical issue for the Republicans, however, is whether they are
going to forfeit all the political mileage they could get out of the
Ricci victory—in which the Supreme Court brusquely junked Sotomayor’s
decision upholding corrupt racial discrimination against white firemen
in New Haven.

The Main Stream Media, of course, has every intention of shoving Ricci
far down the Memory Hole. The only way to remind the public of what is
at stake is to make Ricci the central focus of the Sotomayor hearings.

The strategic issues for Republicans are manifold:

*

Are they going to acquiesce in the growing assumption in the
press that minorities, such as Obama and Sotomayor, are beyond
criticism on anything related to race? If so, what does that bode for
the future of the GOP?
*

Will they forego their best opportunity to point out that Obama
not the post-racial uniter of David Axelrod’s imagination, but is
merely Sotomayor with a more oleaginous prose style?
*

Will they use the high unemployment rate to go on the offensive
against racial preferences, especially against preferences for
immigrants?

Allow me to offer some advice and questions for the Senators.

First, go easy on the excruciatingly boring questions about judicial
philosophy.

The Obama Administration will no doubt have provided Judge Sotomayor
with test-marketed talking points. Anyway, the public doesn’t much
care about judicial philosophy in the abstract. It cares about
philosophies when they lead to injustices done to actual people, such
as what Sotomayor authorized be done to Ricci and his colleagues.

Second, you don’t have to ask Sotomayor the toughest questions about
the Ricci case. The media is all prepared to raise a stink about evil
white male Senators being unchivalrous and insensitive being toward a
Latina. But, fortunately, there’s a sleazy white male stand-in for
Sotomayor.

Make Ricci v. DeStefano humanly vivid to the public by calling as
witnesses both parties: the victim-turned-winner, fireman Frank Ricci,
and the victimizer-turned-loser, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr.

Then let the eight-term politician (who happened to be a Democrat)
have it with both barrels for his slimy acts of racial discrimination
against Ricci.

As the basis for your questioning use Justice Samuel Alito’s
blistering concurring opinion in Ricci, which vividly spells out how
the mayor badgered the Civil Service Board into cheating Ricci.

An argument among three Italian-American guys—Ricci, DeStefano, and
Alito—is less easy for the media to spin along its usual ethnic/gender
"Who? Whom?" lines. So, for once, people will be allowed to think
simply about principles of justice.

It won’t be hard to show that, in practice, "diversity" is just
another word for DeStefano’s Boss Tweed-type politics.

Here are my questions to ask the "wise Latina"—after you’ve worked out
on DeStefano.

Obviously, she’ll bob and weave around most of them, refusing to
answer on the usual specious grounds employed by past nominees. But
these questions would be worth asking for their own rhetorical sake:

*

Much as Chief Justice John Roberts asked during oral arguments
over Ricci… Can you assure us, Judge Sotomayor, that your decision in
Ricci for the City of New Haven would have been the same if minority
firefighters scored highest on this test in disproportionate numbers,
and the City said we don't like that result, we think there should be
more whites on the fire department, and so we're going to throw the
test out?
*

On the South Wall of the Supreme Court Building’s courtroom are
carvings of the "great lawgivers of history." The second earliest
lawgiver depicted is Hammurabi, king of Babylon, who is honored for
carving the laws in stone and putting them up in public—which meant
that even the king couldn’t change the laws after the fact to suit his
convenience. Why should Mayor DeStefano enjoy the privilege that King
Hammurabi denied himself: to see what the final score turned out to
be, then change the rules of the game?
*

In the Obama Administration’s friend of the court brief to the
Supreme Court on the Ricci case, the Obama Administration called for
your decision for summary judgment in favor of Mayor DeStefano to be
overturned and the Ricci case to be remanded to local district court
for retrial on the facts. Why did you vote for a more extremist
outcome than the Obama Administration later called for?
*

Chief Justice Robert s recently wrote, "[t]he way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the
basis of race." Do you agree?
*

Here’s a guest question from Emily Bazelon of Slate and the Yale
Law School about your terse judgment in Ricci: "The problem for
Sotomayor, instead, is why she didn't grapple with the difficult
constitutional issues, the ones Cabranes pointed to. Did she really
have nothing to add to the district court opinion? In a case of this
magnitude and intricacy, why would that be?"
*

Is the primary point of our civil rights laws to protect
minorities or to protect individuals of all races?
*

You have described yourself on video as "a product of
affirmative action" and an "affirmative action baby" and that it is
"critical that we promote diversity." Considering your often-expressed
passionate views on the topic and personal self-interest in promoting
ethnic preferences, how could Frank Ricci have expected even-handed,
colorblind justice from you?
*

Yes, but, according to the Supreme Court, Frank Ricci didn’t get
justice from you, now did he?
*

I realize you resent these questions, but aren’t doubts about
racial bias inevitably created by the act of treating people of
different races differently, acts which you endorse?
*

Considering the personal benefits that ethnic preferences have
provided you over the years, shouldn’t you have recused yourself from
the Ricci case?
*

Will you promise to recuse yourself in all future cases
involving quotas, affirmative action, discrimination, or disparate
impact?
*

Six years ago, in the previous major affirmative action case,
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her majority decision in Gratz,
"We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will
no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
" (That’s now only 19 years from 2009.) Do you agree?
*

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissenting opinion on
Ricci: "The Court's order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have
staying power." Do you agree?
*

Should immigrants be eligible for racial and ethnic preferences?
*

Why?
*

Judge Sotomayor, you were a member of the National Council of La
Raza from 1998 to 2004 . What do the words "La Raza" mean in English?
"

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090709_sotomayor.htm