How does Supreme Court ruling affect Sotomayor perceived bias?
The Supreme Court ruled this morning that firefighters in the controversial court case about reverse racism were unfairly denied promotions because of their race. The judgment reversed Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling that race wasn’t a factor, according to MSNBC.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the [Supreme] court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
A statement by Sotomayor in a 2001speech became controversial after the media interpreted the statement as racist , she said:
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 combination with Sotomayor’s controversal statement, does this ruling further reinforce the idea that Sotomayor has a racial bias? In light of the recent ruling do you think Sotomayor is likely to be in the minority opinion, if accepted?
good point faithful, but i guess i am hanging my hat on the fact that the tests were independently administered, and by all meausure color blind…for the expressed reason of eliminating the very controversy you and i want to avoid……leaving the legislature to change the way they do things by adding descrimination…..not very smart, or progressive
ken, it’s not only possible but used to be extremely common to have independently administered, color-blind criteria that still are discriminatory. The whole reason the law in question came into place was that fire departments and other government agencies that wanted to only hire or promote whites were using criteria that were on their face non-discriminatory, but that in fact made it difficult for blacks to be promoted. For example, fire departments would require high levels of education or employment that blacks were unlikely to have.
Times have changed a lot since then. It’s possible for most people to get a high school education, and community colleges are relatively affordable. So many people think that the ”adverse impact” part of the Civil Rights Act isn’t all that necessary. But the question is, do you want a Court to permanently decide that the Constitution ALWAYS bans those types of laws? Or would it be better to force that discussion into the political process?
Interestingly, people like you CLEARLY want this to be a political issue, because you’re talking about it in the context of the President’s nominee to the Court. I have to wonder if there wasn’t a vacancy on the Court, whether you’d be just as vocal.
i think i would be just as horrified if a white supreme court nominee had said I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a person of color who hasn’t lived that life. yes,faithful, i would be horrified…….
if a white male had said that, he wouldn’t have even made it to the nomination process…..because, its simply rascist…..law be damned, go with color…..not reasonable, and certainly i would expect more from her…and before anyone says this was taken out of context, she repeated this line many times during the 1990’s……including her writings
ken, I’d be just as horrified if a white male judge accused a city, who was just afraid of going bankrupt due to huge legal fees, of hating white people. That’s pretty much what Chief Justice Roberts said at oral argument. He tore into the city’s lawyers as a bunch of racists. I think it’s just as corrosive to see people as white-hating racists for just trying to abide by the law.
I think it’s hilarious that you think Judge Sotomayor is some crazy white hating racist, when her record reflects the opposite. She presided over several race-related cases, and hardly ever found for a minority plaintiff. In all of the cases she did, she was in the majority with Republican-appointed judges.
She only dissented in one race-related case, and that was to suggest that a WHITE policeman who was fired for distributing racist literature while off the job had a First Amendment right to do so, even though she felt the literature was offensive.
faithful, that is a very unique way you para-phrased what Roberts actually said…i guess i would say that i have the unique position here of not having to para-phrase anything Sotomayor said….
ken, I’ll hang my hat on Sotomayor’s actual record, which SCOTUSblog did a great job of analyzing here: http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/judge-sotomayor-and-race/
You can keep waging the losing battle over out of context sound bites. This is a judge who has a long, distinguished record. It’s interesting that conservatives only seem to make affirmative action and race an issue when the nominee is not white. If a John or Jane Smith instead of a Sonya Sotomayor had issued the same rulings, you wouldn’t be accusing her of hating whitey.
faithful, i suppose we are simply going to disagree, and i really want you to find something that the existing supreme court justices would have said that comes close to sotomayor’s offensive statements. you call it sound bites when its offensive, yet i seriously doubt you would have overlooked this statement if it had come from a white male nominee. That is the difference. so i ask you, who is being partisan here ?
Faithful,
How is this activist? It appears that the constitution was applied by the Supreme Court. No matter what precedent Sotamayor was holding up, the Supreme Court’s job is to hold that precedent up against the constitution and make the decision. The majority opinion here reflects anything but judicial activism. The only judicial activism I see is the clear and politically motivated 4-part minority opinion. This is a clear cut case no matter what your judicial philosophy, there is just no grounds for the dissenting on this on. It points out the need to weed out the constitution-disregarding wackos before we issue a robe.
I don’t see the connection. Two judicial bodies disagree on an interpretation of the law. The more superior court has precedence. That’s how the system works. It happens all the time. This says nothing about Sotomayor except that her opinion was overturned. I don’t know too much about this lady, but I do think that quote is used way too often to characterize her. A good and fair journalist would at least describe the context in which the statement was made.