Did Sotomayor help smear Bork?

posted at 12:55 pm on July 2, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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Republicans have questioned how hard they should fight against Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.  After all, they have objected the loudest to the dirty tactics unleashed by Democrats in their successful blocking of Robert Bork and their smearing of Clarence Thomas.  Now, however, the AP reports that the group that Sotomayor helped lead took sides in the political battle against Bork that kept him off the bench in 1987:

A Puerto Rican civil rights organization advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor campaigned against seating conservative Robert Bork on the high court in the late 1980s, according to new documents that shed light on the group that’s become a key focus of Republicans questioning Sotomayor’s fitness to be a justice.

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund officially opposed Bork, whose nomination by President Ronald Reagan was rejected by the Senate in 1987, “because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community,” its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday.

Does this change the ground rules for Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing?  After all, apart from the beating Thomas took from Howard Metzenbaum, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Biden, the Democrats, the Bork hearing created the poisonous environment that exists to this day on judicial nominations.  If Sotomayor took part in that effort, she’s a political figure — much more so than Bork at the time, and therefore fair game.

Michael Barone looks at how the Ricci reversal also changes the game in the hearings:

Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It shows how a combination of vote-hungry politicians and local political agitators — you might call them community organizers — worked with the approval of elite legal professionals like Sotomayor to employ racial quotas and preferences in defiance of the words of the Civil Rights Act. …

This is the sort of thing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described in the text as just the workings of politics. Writing in Slate, Yale Law faculty member Emily Bazelon goes further. She laments that the promotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored “‘fire buffs’ — guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time.”

She is outraged that a fire department might want to promote firefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victims and protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote a predetermined number of members of specific racial groups whose self-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.

Bazelon and Sotomayor, who voted to uphold the city’s decertification of the promotion test, are typical of liberal elites who are ready to ratify squalid political deals — and blatant racial discrimination — in return for the political support and the votes that can be rallied by the likes of Kimber. You supply the numbers on Election Day, and we’ll supply the verbiage to put a pretty label on your shenanigans.

None of this will keep Sotomayor off the court, especially since the Democrats support this kind of politicking and see nothing wrong with it.  Most Americans, though, will view it with disgust, a rejection of the color-blind society we’d all like to see.  The more this gets exposed, the more Sotomayor will look like an extremist political hack — and so will the man who appointed her.

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