Yes, the woman who said a “wise Latina” would be better on the bench than a white man has now decided there are too many of other sorts of people on SCOTUS in order to be, um, fair. If the Unwise Latina thinks identity politics should direct who’s on the court, what are the odds politics are also affecting her decisions? Very high, I’d say.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor says the Supreme Court needs more diversity, amid the politically charged debate about filling a vacancy on the high court.
“I… think there is a disadvantage from having (five) Catholics, three Jews, everyone from an Ivy League school,” Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina justice, said Friday at Brooklyn Law School.
However, she did not mention by name Judge Merrick Garland, a white male with a Harvard Law School degree whom President Obama recently nominated to fill the vacancy of Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative voice on the court. Scalia died unexpectedly in January.
She also told the audience that several of the eight justices are, like her, from New York City and that none has practiced criminal defense law outside white-collar settings. Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law School.
So, SCOTUS would be better if we made sure there was a socialist pagan from Santa Monica College with a degree in Social Justice on the bench, who would consult the Runes or the Oracle every time we needed a judgment about the constitutionality of a law. Got it.
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Justice Scalia made some troubling observations about the “diversity” of the Court in his Obergefell dissent. This quote is from Peggy Noonan’s op-ed, in which she quotes Scalia:
That is to say, our underlying problem is that the Court, like so many other government institutions, has broken free of the restraints of the Constitution. We have to worry about this pack of fools because they’re tampering with our lives in ways they have no right to do. If the Court had stayed within legal boundaries and did its jobs, we wouldn’t have to worry so much and fight so furiously.
There will be no true justice in this country until we have an Albino Eskimo on the Supreme Court. Because…diversity!
Maynard – I agree entirely .
Her saying this should disqualify her from sitting on the court.