benjamin cardozo
President Barack Obama has chosen Judge Sonya Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his nominee for the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter. The formal announcement will be made by the president later this morning.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Obama would continue playing identity politics by nominating an Hispanic woman. Sotomayor, 54, is also of the most radical liberal activist judges he could have nominated.
In a presentation that will likely lean heavily on style over substance, Sotomayor’s background will allow the administration to again play class warfare with their presentation of her biography. The daughter of Puerto Rican parents growing up in the South Bronx, her father was a manual laborer and her mother a nurse. Her father died when she was 9.
Sotomayor went on to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School before working as a New York assistant district attorney. Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked a confirmation deal with the first President Bush to nominate Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.
In one of the biggest sources of the coming Sotomayor controversy, is her conduct in the New Haven, Connecticut firefighter case that’s now on appeal to the Supreme Court.
In Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with the City of New Haven that was alleged to have used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters. Sotomayor joined a per curiam opinion that went so far as to bury the white firefighters’ crucial claims of unfair treatment. Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her in writing for apparently missing the entire host of Constitutional issues that were before the court.
