6996: Wise Latina Confirmed For Supreme Court.

From USA TODAY…

Sotomayor confirmed by Senate

By Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up speaking Spanish in a public housing project, is headed for a seat on the Supreme Court after an overwhelming Senate vote Thursday to make her the first Hispanic member of the court.

Her elevation prompted jubilation among leaders of the nation’s fast-growing Hispanic community.

“This is America!” exulted Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., who is one of two Hispanics in the Senate, just before casting his vote.

The vote was 68-31, with only the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., missing the roll call. Nine Republicans joined 57 Democrats and two independents in confirming President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

Obama praised the Senate’s vote as “breaking another barrier and moving us yet another step closer to a more perfect union.”

The Supreme Court issued a news release saying Sotomayor will be sworn in Saturday by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Two Democrats, Robert Byrd and Barbara Mikulski, were rolled into the Senate chamber in wheelchairs to make the vote. Byrd, 91, has been recuperating from a serious infection. He signaled his “aye” vote by twirling his finger in the air.

Mikulski had a pink ribbon on the ankle she recently broke. The packed gallery started giggling when they heard the voice of Al Franken, who was given the duty of presiding over the chamber for the vote, calling the senators to order.

Senators voted from their seats, rather than milling about casually, procedure the Senate adheres to only for the most formal of occasions.

A 17-year veteran of the federal bench, Sotomayor grew up in the Bronx and won scholarships to Princeton University and Yale Law School. At 55, she will be the court’s second-youngest member, six months older than Roberts.

She will be the 111th justice to serve on the Supreme Court and the third woman. She will replace retired justice David Souter.

The ethnic background she shares with 47 million Hispanics in the USA has garnered the most attention.

“I can’t think of a bigger milestone for Hispanics in this country,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization.

In Chicago, law student Anna Lozoya said Thursday Sotomayor is a role model for her and other Latinas. Lozoya, 28, who also is a diabetic like Stotomayor, said she believes they share an ethos that?s particularly acute in immigrants’ children: “You follow the dream and you live it.”

Sotomayor’s rise from public housing to the nation’s highest court symbolizes “the promise of our most amazing nation,” Menendez said.

In Puerto Rico, where both of Sotomayor’s parents lived before moving to New York City, support for Sotomayor’s nomination was sky-high and bipartisan. Republican Gov. Luis Fortuno endorsed her nomination.

“Everybody is waiting this week to celebrate,” Emmaline Garcia, a commonwealth judge who has known Sotomayor for 15 years, told USA TODAY.

Opinions were more divided in Washington.

“As much as I like Judge Sotomayor and I am impressed with the obstacles she has overcome, there are aspects of Judge Sotomayor’s record that make me uncomfortable,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, one of the last members of her party to announce her vote, said in a speech late Wednesday.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., another late-decider, came down in Sotomayor’s favor. Even though he and the judge “may not see eye to eye on all issues or share the same political ideologies,” Gregg said, “she is obviously well-qualified.”

A number of Hispanic Republican leaders expressed dismay that the nation’s first Hispanic nominee to the high court hadn’t drawn more support from their party.

“It sets a bad tone, and it’s a bad message,” said Augustine Martinez, head of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Opponents of Sotomayor’s nomination went out of their way to praise her as a trailblazer and a role model.

“Every American should be proud that a Hispanic woman has been nominated to the Supreme Court,” said the Senate’s Deputy Republican leader, Jon Kyl of Arizona.

“This is a wonderful woman,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

In arguing against her nomination, they focused on a speech in which Sotomayor suggested that a “wise Latina” could reach fairer decisions than her white male colleagues on the bench and decisions she made regarding gun control, property rights and affirmative action.

The National Rifle Association announced its opposition to Sotomayor because she joined a ruling upholding a New York state ban on martial arts sticks. The NRA raised concerns that it could open the door to curtailing the rights of gun owners.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said that as a “duck hunter and a gun owner,” she trusts Sotomayor’s ability to come to cases “with an open mind.”

Other Republicans, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabaman who is his party’s top-ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, objected to Sotomayor’s decisions favoring municipal governments’ rights to seize public property for redevelopment and opposing New Haven firefighters who sued after the results of a test were thrown out when few minorities qualified.

Sotomayor told the Judiciary Committee she was following established Supreme Court precedent in the New Haven firefighters case — precedent the Supreme Court changed in reversing the decision.

Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, the only Hispanic Republican in the Senate, said his colleagues were looking for “excuses” to oppose Obama’s nominee.

“It’s unwarranted by her record and her judicial views, which I think are fairly moderate,” he said.

Democrats such as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill, argued that Sotomayor’s lengthy service as a judge — she has served longer on the bench than any other Supreme Court nominee in 100 years — proves her impartiality.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., mocked the criticism of Sotomayor’s “wise Latina remark.”

“To talk about being a Latino, well, what is wrong with a little ethnic pride?” Specter said. “And isn’t it about time that we had some greater diversity on the Supreme Court?”

A number of Republicans, such as Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, contrasted GOP senators’ treatment of Sotomayor’s nomination with Democrats’ refusal to allow a vote on Miguel Estrada. Estrada, a prominent Hispanic lawyer, was nominated by President George W. Bush to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Estrada withdrew his name from consideration in September 2003 after a 28-month filibuster.

Martinez said he believes Democrats treated Estrada unfairly, but he argued that Sotomayor should not pay the price. “Some of my colleagues conclude that what is good for the goose is good for the gander,” Martinez said. “I could not disagree more heartily.”

Contributing: Judy Keen in Chicago

6944: Diversity On Trial…?

From The Chicago Tribune…

Diversity a touchy topic at Sotomayor hearings

What Sen. Jeff Sessions calls an ‘honest discussion’ on race, some observers say is an attack on ethnic pride.

By James Oliphant and David G. Savage

Two months ago, Sonia Sotomayor’s Latino heritage was viewed as an overwhelming asset. And though history will be made if she becomes the Supreme Court’s newest justice, there wasn’t much talk about that during three days of grueling testimony last week. For some, her confirmation hearings left a bitter taste.

“This is a great first, but we are not being allowed to celebrate it in the way we are allowed to celebrate Thurgood Marshall as the first African American on the court,” said Laura Gomez, a University of New Mexico law professor.

That’s because Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee attempted to shine a negative light on Sotomayor’s earlier statements about what she as a Latina could bring to judging and on her connections with a Latino advocacy group. In wave after wave of questions, they suggested that statements by the New York federal appellate judge indicated an inability to remain impartial on the bench.

Sotomayor had given them ammunition: speeches in which she said she hoped that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.”

By the end of the week, however, she had forcefully rejected that notion—along with the idea that her diverse background meant she would judge with “empathy,” a quality President Obama had said was important for a high court justice.

She also denied being involved in abortion-rights lawsuits filed by the Puerto Rican advocacy group whose board she served on for 12 years.

Even though Sotomayor is almost certain to be confirmed, some Republicans considered their bid to root out what they saw as potential prejudices as a kind of victory.

“We had a more honest discussion of some of the complexities and sensitivities of the race question in this hearing than in the 12 years I have been in the Senate,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, whose own bid for a federal judgeship was blocked because of racially insensitive remarks he had made in the past.

Sotomayor’s supporters, however, viewed the questioning another way.

“It was extremely disappointing and a walk backward from the point of diversity,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland. “This was not a productive conversation. It was unfortunate posturing by the Republicans.

“This was an all-white judiciary committee asking condescending questions. And it was an unequal power situation. She was not in a position to honestly engage with them, because she needed their votes.”

What last week’s public exercise illustrated was the nature of questions of race and identity in America: Ethnic pride to some is identity politics to others.

Read the full story here.

6907: Legally And Morally Bankrupt.

Hating Mondays with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• General Motors was granted permission by a federal bankruptcy judge to sell the bulk of its assets to a new entity. Somebody better ask for a CARFAX® report.

• Rep. Peter King of New York declared the late Michael Jackson was a “pervert” and wondered why Americans are “glorifying” a “low-life” while ignoring real heroes like firefighters, cops and teachers. Ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will probably step in to tell King to tone it down already.

• Colin Powell criticized his fellow Republicans for their attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Powell believes Sotomayor should not be condemned for ruling against White firefighters in a reverse discrimination case. He added, “What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor … called a racist.” Rush Limbaugh will likely respond by calling Powell a racist.

6886: Racial Rules.

Court jesting in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• France recorded a first: A huge corporation has received a guilty verdict for systematic race discrimination. L’Oréal was found guilty of racial discrimination for recruiting White women only during a shampoo promotion in 2000. The ruling included a monetary fine and a three-month suspended jail sentence for company officials. Three-month suspended jail sentence? Damn, rap artists and supermodels have done more time for throwing cell phones. And it took nine years to decide the beauty company showed bias? However, let’s not be too quick to connect this ruling to the Beyoncé ”whitewashing” ad. That one probably belongs to the culturally clueless advertising agency versus the client.

• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of White firefighters in Connecticut who qualified for promotions by receiving good grades on a test that the city later tossed out because Black firefighters did not do well. The case had added significance because Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor originally ruled against the firefighters, and critics are using that fact to question her qualifications. “In reviewing the [firefighters] case, I am concerned that Judge Sotomayor may have lost sight of [the distinction between personal views and the law],” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. “As we consider this nomination, I will continue to examine her record to see if personal or political views have influenced her judgment.” Hey, douchebag, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4. Will you be examining the existing Supreme Court Justices too?

6856: Beef And Bull.

Digesting the news with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Mickey D’s is primed to launch its Anus Angus Burger, the third-pound slab of beef on a bun. Um, isn’t the fast feeder a little slow to market with this product? At this point, even Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Starbucks are probably offering Angus burgers.

• Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, seeking to end the controversy ignited by Republicans, ended her membership with a women’s club. Let’s hope Sotomayor was never a Girl Scout. Regardless, the move should accelerate her admission into the Supreme Boy’s Club.

6844: Sotomayor Explains The Girl’s Club.

From The New York Times…

Sotomayor Defends Ties to Association

By Charlie Savage and David D. Kirkpatrick

WASHINGTON — Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Monday defended her membership in an all-female networking club, telling senators preparing for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing that the group did not discriminate in an inappropriate way.

Judge Sotomayor made the remarks in a cover letter for 10 documents the White House submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The papers supplement a trove of documents and videos, along with a response to a questionnaire, that she turned over earlier this month.

Her remarks indicate that some senators have taken an interest in her membership in the group, Belizean Grove, which she mentioned in the questionnaire response.

“I am a member of the Belizean Grove, a private organization of female professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors,” Judge Sotomayor wrote. “The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Men are involved in its activities — they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions — but to the best of my knowledge, a man has never asked to be considered for membership.”

She added: “It is also my understanding that all interested individuals are duly considered by the membership committee. For these reasons, I do not believe that my membership in the Belizean Grove violates the Code of Judicial Conduct.”

The code says judges should avoid giving the appearance of “impropriety” by holding “membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin.” An organization is said to “discriminate invidiously if it arbitrarily excludes from membership” on the basis of such factors “persons who would otherwise be admitted to membership,” it says.

According to the Belizean Grove’s Web site, the group is a “constellation of influential women” who are building “long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.” It was founded as a counterpart to the all-male Bohemian Grove, a legendary club of elite politicians, businessmen and other leaders.

The group’s roughly 115 “grovers,” as members call themselves, include ambassadors and top executives of Goldman Sachs, Victoria’s Secret and Harley-Davidson. They meet each year for an annual retreat in Belize or another Central American destination, as well as occasionally in New York and other cities for outings described as “a balance of fun, substantive programs and bonding.” The group’s Web site does not appear to mention any roles for men.

6833: Scrutinizing Sotomayor.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Is Judge Sotomayor playing race card?

Like a stopped clock that is accurate twice a day, Rush Limbaugh is sometimes actually funny.

After Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor tripped and broke her ankle Monday, Limbaugh said, “I hope she can find a wise Latina doctor to set that ankle, as opposed to an average white doctor, because the wise Latina doctor has much richer experience with broken ankles.”

Oh, come on. That is funny.

Or at least reasonably clever, Sotomayor having said in 2001, “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.”

I have defended Sotomayor for making that statement, while the White House has not. “I’m sure she would have restated it,” President Barack Obama said shortly after the storm broke over Sotomayor’s remarks.

Sotomayor has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, assuring senators that what she meant to say was that “there is only one law” and she would follow that law “ultimately and completely.”

But you can see why Democrats are nervous. Roland Burris, a political hack, muscled his way into the Senate by nakedly playing the race card, and now everybody is jumpy about any comments that seem to indicate one race should be favored over another. (Unless it is white people being favored, in which case there is rarely a controversy.)

Burris, whose main claim to fame was that in 16 years of holding public office in Illinois he had not been indicted even once, was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who a few weeks earlier had been led away in handcuffs, accused of trying to sell that Senate seat.

Initially, the White House and the Senate’s Democratic leadership wanted to delay Burris’ appointment until Blagojevich was impeached so the new, untainted governor of Illinois could fill the seat.

But Team Burris quickly moved into action. Rep. Bobby Rush dared the Senate to deny a black man the seat that had been held by Barack Obama.

“There are no African Americans in the Senate, and I don’t think that anyone, any U.S. senator who is sitting right now, would want to go on record to deny one African American from being seated in the U.S. Senate,” he said.

After Burris stood outside the Senate in the rain after being rebuffed from taking his seat on Jan. 6, Rush went on “Hardball With Chris Matthews” and said: “It reminded me of the dogs being sicced on children in Birmingham.”

With that, opposition to the quick seating of Burris collapsed.

After going back to Illinois and swearing under oath that he had never tried to buy the Senate seat from Blagojevich, Burris returned to Washington and was sworn in as the junior senator from Illinois.

All has not gone well, however. Two weeks ago, the transcript of a secretly recorded phone call between Burris and the brother of Blagojevich was released in federal court. In the phone call, Burris offers to write a check to the Rod Blagojevich campaign and says, “I’m very much interested in, in trying to replace Obama, OK.”

The Senate Ethics Committee is looking into all of this, but some senators are now nervous and angry. They folded in the face of the race card when it came to Burris, but now some are aflame over what they see as Sonia Sotomayor’s playing of the same card.

“We need to know, for example, whether she’s going to be a justice for all of us or just a justice for a few of us,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, said on “Meet the Press” with David Gregory that while he would not use the word “racist” to describe Sotomayor, “I think that she is a person who believes that her background can influence her decision. That’s what troubles me.”

The Democrats are sticking with Sotomayor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wrote an op-ed piece recently in the Miami Herald that began: “Some slivers of my past: a dust storm. A one-room schoolhouse. The teacher who gave me boxing gloves.”

Reid writes that all those things shaped his life, just as Sotomayor’s life “as a Latina” shaped hers. He says that as he talked to Sotomayor recently, he saw a “reflection of myself and of the fabric of this country.”

“She is the quintessential American story. How is this a detriment to the highest court in the land?”

A good question. And, as her nomination hearings begin July 13, one that is sure to be asked repeatedly.

6811: The Supreme Court’s New Odd Couple.

From The New York Times…

For Sotomayor and Thomas, Paths Diverge at Race

By Jodi Kantor and David Gonzalez

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor joins Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, they may find that they have far more than a job title in common.

Both come from the humblest of beginnings. Both were members of the first sizable generation of minority students at elite colleges and then Yale Law School. Both benefited from affirmative action policies.

But that is where their similarities end, and their disagreements begin. For the first time, the Supreme Court would include two minority judges, but ones who stand at opposite poles of thinking about race, identity and opportunity. Judge Sotomayor and Justice Thomas have walked parallel paths and yet arrived at contrary conclusions, not only on legal questions, but on personal ones, too.

Judge Sotomayor celebrates being Latina, calling it a reason for her success; Justice Thomas bristles at attempts to define him by race and says he has succeeded despite the obstacles it posed. Being a woman of Puerto Rican descent is rich and fulfilling, Judge Sotomayor says, while Justice Thomas calls being a black man in America a largely searing experience. Off the bench, Judge Sotomayor has helped build affirmative action programs. On the bench, Justice Thomas has argued against them with thunderous force.

The two may sit together on a court that is struggling over whether race and ethnicity should be a factor in legal thinking, each pitting his or her hard-won lessons against the other’s. Both judges are passionate about minority success, dedicating countless hours to mentorship. But Judge Sotomayor sees herself as the successful product of diversity initiatives, whereas Justice Thomas, who thinks of himself as a scarred survivor of those efforts, believes they often backfire.

The two judges have lived, not just argued, the strongest cases for and against affirmative action, said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University. With both on the court, he said, “their voices are going to come to exemplify the contending positions.”

When Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas arrived at college — she at Princeton in 1972, he at Holy Cross in 1968 — they worried about the same thing: what others would think when they opened their mouths.

Ms. Sotomayor had grown up in the Bronx speaking Spanish; Mr. Thomas’s relatives in Pin Point, Ga., mixed English with Gullah, a language of the coastal South. Both attended Catholic school, where they were drilled by nuns in grammar and other subjects. But at college, they realized they still sounded unpolished.

Ms. Sotomayor shut herself in her dorm room and eventually resorted to grade-school grammar textbooks to relearn her syntax. Mr. Thomas barely spoke, he said later, and majored in English literature to conquer the language.

“I just worked at it,” he said in an interview years later, “on my pronunciations, sounding out words.”

For many East Coast colleges, it was a new era. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Holy Cross pledged to do its part in the civil rights movement by recruiting black students; just a few months later, Mr. Thomas became one of six in his freshman class.

Princeton was integrating not only by race and ethnicity, but also by gender. Ms. Sotomayor was one of 20 Hispanics in her class, students estimate. Princeton had admitted women just a few years earlier, and “husband-hunters,” as one of the alumni still campaigning against their presence called them, were vastly outnumbered at the college.

When the students arrived, they were subject to constant suspicion that they had not earned their slots. “It was a question echoed over and over again, not only verbally but in people’s thoughts,” said Franklin Moore, a former Princeton administrator. Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas, honors students in high school, considered themselves qualified. But to prove their critics wrong, they studied with special determination.

“We can’t let these people think we just came off the street without anything to offer Princeton,” said Eneida Rosa, another member of the Hispanic contingent, describing how seriously she and Ms. Sotomayor took their studies.

The two future judges led similar student organizations — Mr. Thomas helped found a black student group, while Ms. Sotomayor was co-chairwoman of a Puerto Rican one — and shared the same liberal politics. They graduated at the top of their classes. And afterward, they each headed to Yale Law School.

Interpretations

But perhaps because of their backgrounds, Judge Sotomayor and Justice Thomas came to view their campus experiences in very different ways.

Even by the standards of the Jim Crow South, Mr. Thomas’s childhood was marked by bitter blows and isolation. He was taunted not only by classmates at his all-white high school but also by blacks, who called him “ABC,” for “America’s Blackest Child,” on account of his dark skin. A black among Catholics and a Catholic among blacks, he sometimes seemed to fit in nowhere at all.

Mr. Thomas learned he could rely only on himself. His father left when he was a toddler. A few years later, his mother sent him to live with his grandparents, dumping his possessions in grocery bags and sending him out the front door, he wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

Ms. Sotomayor also grew up without a father; hers died of heart problems when she was 9. But her mother was a sustaining force, supporting the family by working as a nurse. In a recent speech, Judge Sotomayor recalled her mother and grandmother chatting and chopping ingredients for dinner. “I can’t describe to you the warmth of that moment for a child,” she said.

In New York, Puerto Ricans were pitied for poverty and blamed for crime. Popular images were dominated by the gangs of “West Side Story” and bumbling comics with broken English. According to friends, Ms. Sotomayor was not active in her high school’s small Latino club. Ethnicity was not something to be ashamed of, they said, but they did not really celebrate it either.

But on Princeton’s manicured campus, Ms. Sotomayor explored her roots in a way she never had on trips to Puerto Rico or in “Nuyorican” circles back home. In a Puerto Rican studies seminar, she absorbed the literature, economics, history and politics of the island, and by senior year, she was writing a thesis on its first democratically elected governor. In its dedication, she sounds newly enchanted with her heritage.

“To my family,” she wrote, “for you have given me my Puerto Rican-ness.”

“To the people of my island, for the rich history that is mine,” she continued.

Back to Their Roots

Ms. Sotomayor was not alone; for many minority students who arrived at elite colleges, the first thing they wanted to study was their own backgrounds. “What we did on campus was to use its resources to understand ourselves in a larger context,” said Eduardo Padro, a New York State Supreme Court justice who was raised in East Harlem and arrived at Yale in 1971, part of the first group of working-class Puerto Ricans there.

Ms. Sotomayor also became a passionate advocate for Hispanic recruitment. She took a work-study job in the admissions office, traveling to high schools and lobbying on behalf of her best prospects. As co-chairwoman of Accíon Puertorriqueña, she wrote a complaint accusing Princeton of discrimination, convinced the leaders of the Chicano Caucus to co-sign it and filed it with the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

But Ms. Sotomayor was no campus radical. She was more likely to mete out discipline than to be subjected to it: in an early turn at judgeship, she sat on a panel that ruled on student infractions.

William Bowen, Princeton’s president at the time, recalled in an interview that he used to call her for advice on Hispanic issues. After all, the university’s leadership wanted to make it more diverse, and Ms. Sotomayor’s activism helped them make their case. As a result of her efforts, other students said, Princeton hired its first Hispanic administrator and invited a Puerto Rican professor to teach.

While Ms. Sotomayor embraced her ethnicity in college and helped bring more Hispanics to campus, Mr. Thomas began to worry about the consequences of racial categorizations and grew skeptical of Holy Cross’s efforts to enroll blacks.

He flirted a bit with black nationalism, reading Malcolm X’s autobiography until the pages were worn. He drank in Ayn Rand’s ideas about individualism. He identified with the protagonists of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison novels, whose destinies were determined by racial stereotypes.

“I began to think of myself as a man without a country,” he wrote in his autobiography about his increasing alienation.

Some of his black classmates were losing their way, failing classes or falling into drug use, and he began to think of the college’s recruitment efforts as misguided. In his autobiography, he wrote of “these gifted young people being sacrificed on the altar of an abstract theory of social justice.”

Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas missed each other at Yale by only a few years, but they might as well have studied at entirely different institutions.

Given her standout record at Princeton, said James A. Thomas, a former dean of admissions, Ms. Sotomayor’s background had little role in her acceptance to the school. Again, she immersed herself in Puerto Rican issues, winning a spot on the law review with an article about Puerto Rico’s rights to resources in its seabed, leading the minority students’ association and urging the administration to hire a tenured Hispanic faculty member. (A quarter-century later, she is still pressing the school on the issue.)

Mr. Thomas, though, felt out of place from the moment he arrived and only became more disaffected. He had listed his race on his application and later felt haunted by the decision.

“I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving could make me one of them,” he wrote. He ran into financial troubles and applied for scholarship money from a wealthy Yale family, a process he found humiliating. Friends recall that he insisted on dressing like a field hand, in overalls and a hat.

Shared Rejection

Mr. Thomas and Ms. Sotomayor did have one experience in common: law firm interviewers asked them if they really deserved their slots at Yale, implying that they might not have been accepted if they were white.

Ms. Sotomayor fought back so intensely — against a Washington firm, now merged with another — that she surprised even some of the school’s Hispanics. She filed a complaint with a faculty-student panel, which rejected the firm’s initial letter of apology and asked for a stronger one. Minority and women’s groups covered campus with fliers supporting her. Ms. Sotomayor eventually dropped her complaint, but the firm had already suffered a blow to its reputation.

Mr. Thomas was more private about the experience — even some friends do not recall it — but he took it hard. With rejection letters piling up, he feared he would not be able to support his wife and young son.

The problem, Mr. Thomas concluded, was affirmative action. Whites would not hire him, he concluded, because no one believed he had attended Yale on his own merits. He felt acute betrayal: his education was supposed to put him on equal footing, but he was not offered the jobs that his white classmates were getting. He saved the pile of rejection letters, he said in a speech years later.

“It was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference,” he wrote in his autobiography.

From Yale, Mr. Thomas and Ms. Sotomayor took what seemed like entirely different paths: he as a Reagan official who helped dismantle affirmative action programs; she as a prosecutor and litigator.

But once in a while, their stories have converged. In their nominations to the Supreme Court, both were presented as barrier-breaking success stories. Both have seen those nominations become bogged down in debates about race and ethnicity.

And at times, each of them has viewed opposition to their confirmations in racial or ethnic terms. When Democrats opposed Justice Thomas’s nomination because of sexual harassment accusations, he called it a “high-tech lynching,” a triumph of stereotype.

Judge Sotomayor saw a hitch in her own confirmation for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in a not entirely dissimilar light. Senate Republicans had held up her nomination for a year, and shortly afterward, she said they made assumptions about her views simply “because I was Hispanic and a woman.”

“I was dealt with on the basis of stereotypes,” she said.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

6806: Diversity Controversial For Court Role…?

From The New York Times…

Speeches Show Judge’s Steady Focus on Diversity and Struggle

By Peter Baker and Jo Becker

WASHINGTON — In speech after speech over the years, Judge Sonia Sotomayor has returned to the themes of diversity, struggle, heritage and alienation that have both powered and complicated her nomination to the Supreme Court.

She has lamented the dearth of Hispanics on the federal bench. She has exhorted young people to value immigration. She has mulled over the “deeply confused image” America has of its own racial identity. And she has used on more than one occasion a version of the “wise Latina” line that she has spent much of this week trying to explain.

Dozens of her speeches released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday underscore the dynamics that have defined her case for the court. As President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice David H. Souter, Judge Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic and third woman to serve on the Supreme Court, distinctions that have generated much excitement. But her discussion of ethnicity and gender issues has provided fodder for critics who call her a judicial activist.

The debate has focused more on her off-the-bench public addresses than her court rulings, which even some critics have called more moderate than her words. As it submitted her answers to a Senate questionnaire Thursday, the White House called on lawmakers and the public to assess her based on her deep experience as a prosecutor, corporate litigator and federal judge.

The White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, said in a statement, “The answers demonstrate how Judge Sotomayor’s three-decade career and her significant contributions to the law and her community provide her with unique and unprecedented qualifications to be the next Supreme Court justice.”

Accompanying the 172-page questionnaire sent to the Judiciary Committee were five boxes of her speeches, writings and other materials, which both sides began poring through for evidence to validate their arguments. Republicans on the committee withheld comment while they studied the documents.

The nominee emerging from the papers is a prosecutor who tried violent criminals like the so-called Tarzan Murderer, a lawyer who represented silk-purse clients like Fendi and Ferrari, and a judge who ruled on subjects as varied as a strike by baseball players and the exclusionary rule. After 17 years on the district court and now the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, Judge Sotomayor has accumulated so little money that her credit card and dental bills nearly match her total savings.

The documents reveal that the White House contacted her about a possible Supreme Court nomination on April 27, three days before Justice Souter’s plan to retire was publicly reported. From that point on, she wrote, she had “near daily phone calls” with White House officials, indicating how serious Mr. Obama was about her as a candidate from the beginning.

Unlike Mr. Obama, who as president has largely avoided overt discussion of his racial identity, Judge Sotomayor has made her ethnicity a regular theme of her public addresses, touching on it to make points with audiences that were sometimes largely Hispanic and sometimes not. At times, she portrayed herself as a stranger in a strange land.

“Somewhere all of us Puerto Ricans and people of color have had a defining moment when we were shocked into learning that we were different and that American society treated us differently,” she told the National Puerto Rican Coalition in 1998. “The shock and sense of being an alien will never again, I suspect, be as profound for any of us as that first experience, because I know from personal experience that our education and professional training have equipped us to deal better in this sometimes alien land.”

In another 1998 speech, she said the United States was often ambivalent about how to deal with its diversity. “America has a deeply confused image of itself that is a perpetual source of tension,” she said. “We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence.

“Yet we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race- and color-blind way that ignores those very differences that in other contexts we laud.”

Her speeches also indicate that she is not afraid to take on opponents. In 1998, after she was confirmed to the appeals court, she recounted how she was vigorously questioned by senators based on what she called “mischaracterization and misunderstanding of three of my decisions” by Rush Limbaugh. In recent days, Mr. Limbaugh has led the fight against her nomination, calling her a “reverse racist.”

In a 2001 speech, Judge Sotomayor attributed the yearlong delay before her confirmation to “Senate Republican leaders who believed that I was a potential for the Supreme Court one day.”

On another sensitive topic, Judge Sotomayor said in 2004 that international law held “very limited formal force” in the United States but that judges should not “close their minds to good ideas.”

She added: “If the idea has validity, if it persuades you, then you’re going to adopt its reasoning. If it doesn’t fit, then you won’t use it.”

That was the same year she made the comment about how a “wise Latina” could make a better decision than a white man. The White House has called that a poor choice of words, but it was not the only time she used them. In 1994, she said something similar, although she referred to women generally, not just Latinas. And in 2003, she said a “wise Latina woman” would “reach a better conclusion” but did not say better than whom.

The White House argued that the fact that she had used a similar formulation in 1994 without its being questioned during the 1998 confirmation process showed that it was now being manufactured as a false issue. And to rebut the notion that she would let her background blur her jurisprudence, the administration pointed to a 2000 speech in which she said, “I have to unhook myself from my emotional responses and try to stay within my unemotional, objective persona.”

The documents submitted to the Senate underscored how much more modest Judge Sotomayor’s finances were than those of many of her would-be colleagues. Judge Sotomayor, who makes about $180,000 a year, owns no stock and has just $31,985 in savings. Her two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, which she bought in 1998 for $360,000, is her only major asset, valued at just under $1 million.

After refinancing several times, she owes $381,775 on the home as well as $15,000 for credit card bills and $15,000 for dental bills, making her net worth just over $740,000.

Federal judges who spend at least 15 years on the bench, as Judge Sotomayor has, are entitled to an annual retirement benefit equal to their full salary for life starting at age 65.

Reporting was contributed by Adam Liptak, Charlie Savage and Bernie Becker.

6803: Open And Honest Morons.

Speakers talking shit in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Newt Gingrich backpedaled on his remarks that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. “My initial reaction was strong and direct—perhaps too strong and too direct,” explained Gingrich. “The sentiment struck me as racist, and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor’s fitness to serve on the nation’s highest court have been critical of my word choice.” Heaven forbid Gingrich would want to join an open and honest consideration.

• Senate committee members spanked automaker honchos for dumping dealerships. Senator John D. Rockefeller griped, “Let me be very clear—I don’t believe that companies should be allowed to take taxpayer funds for a bailout and then leave local dealers and their customers to fend for themselves with no real notice and no real help. It’s just plain wrong.” Wait until the committee sees how automakers treat multicultural advertising agencies.

• The good news: Walmart claims it will create 22,000 new jobs in 2009. The bad news: the jobs require working at Walmart.

6790: Ruling Minorities.

From The New York Times…

The Waves Minority Judges Always Make

By Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black member of the Supreme Court, ended his 24 years there bitter and frustrated. He had been unable, he said, to persuade his colleagues in many cases concerning racial equality, the cause to which he had devoted his life.

“What do they know about Negroes?” Justice Marshall asked an interviewer. “You can’t name one member of this court who knows anything about Negroes before he came to this court.”

But the other justices did get to know Justice Marshall, and even the more conservative ones acknowledged that his very presence exerted a gravitational pull more powerful than his single vote.

“Marshall could be a persuasive force just by sitting there,” Justice Antonin Scalia told Juan Williams in an interview for a biography of Justice Marshall, recalling the justices’ private conferences about cases. “He wouldn’t have to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race.”

President’s Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court, where she would be the first Hispanic and the third woman, has raised questions about how her background would affect her decision-making. But there is another question, too: How would she alter the larger dynamic among the justices?

The first woman on the court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, often says that wise old women and wise old men reach the same conclusions. But empirical research on federal appeals courts tugs in another direction.

In sex discrimination and sexual harassment cases, according a 2005 study by Jennifer L. Peresie in The Yale Law Journal, “female judges were significantly more likely than male judges to find for plaintiffs.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, the study found, “the presence of a female judge significantly increased the probability that a male” on a three-judge panel “supported the plaintiff in the cases.” Indeed, “panels with at least one female judge decided cases for the plaintiff more than twice as often as did all-male panels.”

A study in The Columbia Law Review last year found a similar effect in voting rights cases. “When a white judge sits on a panel with at least one African-American judge,” the study, conducted by Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles, concluded, “she becomes roughly 20 percentage points more likely to find” a voting rights violation.

In an interview, Ms. Peresie, a Washington lawyer, cautioned against extrapolating to the Supreme Court from studies of appeals courts. “Maybe one out of nine is different from one out of three,” Ms. Peresie said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and currently the only female justice, said that she and Justice O’Connor, who preceded her, brought a distinct perspective to the court.

“As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” Justice Ginsburg recently told Joan Biskupic of USA Today.

But Justice Ginsburg said her own influence in all sorts of cases at the justices’ conferences was uncertain. “I will say something — and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker — and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” Justice Ginsburg said.

Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard and an authority on the Supreme Court, said Justice O’Connor’s arrival at the court “did affect the way other justices responded.”

“These are older guys,” Mr. Tushnet said. “They haven’t dealt with women on a professional basis on the whole.” Similarly, he said, “very few of the present justices have interacted as equals with Hispanic professionals.” All justices bring their life experiences to the bench in some sense, of course, and Justices Marshall, O’Connor and Ginsburg seemed to devote special attention to cases involving the groups they belonged to.

In a 1992 reminiscence, Justice O’Connor wrote that Justice Marshall was “constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth.” She recalled the moving stories Justice Marshall would tell to support his view that racism played a pernicious role in the administration of capital punishment.

It is not clear, though, that any of those stories caused Justice O’Connor to change her vote. “Justice O’Connor was not nearly as sympathetic to racial civil rights claims as she was to gender claims,” said Lawrence Baum, a political science professor at Ohio State.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the second African-American justice, is by some measures the most conservative justice since 1937, while Justice Marshall was the most liberal. “Thomas is living proof and a daily reminder that not everyone from a particular background has a particular point of view,” said David J. Garrow, a historian at Cambridge University, in England.

Judge Sotomayor has attracted attention for her musings in a 2001 speech about the impact her background might have on her decision-making, remarks a White House spokesman on Friday said reflected a poor choice of words.

“I would hope,” she said, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She added, in a less noted passage, that giants on the court, including Justice Benjamin Cardozo, the second Jewish justice, had on occasion stumbled. “Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society,” Judge Sotomayor said.

Still, many judges say that the law is a set of neutral principles that can be applied mechanically and ought not to vary depending on the judge applying them.

Justice Felix Frankfurter, dissenting in a 1943 decision that struck down a law requiring students to salute the flag, reminded his colleagues that he was, as a Jew, a member of “the most vilified and persecuted minority in history” and thus likely to be sympathetic to a broad interpretation of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. “But as judges,” he went on, “we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.”

Cases with special resonance for Hispanics may not have quite the same profile as cases concerning religion, race and gender, but the Supreme Court will nonetheless face several of them in the years to come, particularly in the areas of immigration, election law and language education in the public schools.

The presence of a Hispanic justice, Professor Tushnet said, will have the usual effect. “Every time there’s a new justice,” he said, “everybody has to say, ‘How will he or she react if I say this?’ ” That is not only an outsider’s view. Justice David H. Souter, the justice whom Judge Sotomayor hopes to replace, has written that the addition of a new judicial perspective necessarily unsettles the existing ones on a court.

“Anyone who has ever sat on a bench with other judges knows that judges are supposed to influence each other, and they do,” Justice Souter wrote in a 1998 dissent in a death penalty case. “One may see something the others did not see, and then they all take another look.”

6785: Calling Out Racism Isn’t Racist.

From CNN.com…

Commentary: Judge Sotomayor is not a racist

By Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor of law at the University of Maryland School of Law and a civil rights lawyer who specializes in voting rights and political participation. She is the author of “On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century,” and is a regular contributor to The Root at http://www.theroot.com/.

(CNN) -- When Don Imus denigrated in clearly racist terms the championship women’s basketball team from Rutgers University; when actor Michael Richards screamed at black guests in a comedy club, calling them the “n-word” and invoking the threat of lynching; when Trent Lott said that things would have been better if a southern segregationist had been elected president a half-century earlier, responsible white people from across the ideological spectrum stepped forward to explain that these individuals were not racist.

The “R” word has become the taboo of the white world. By this I mean that calling someone racist is a taboo, not racism itself.

So when Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and several other conservative commentators call a sitting federal appeals court judge and Supreme Court nominee who happens to be Latina, a racist, it’s time to push back. Real hard.

The evidence offered in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s alleged racism is a speech she gave in Berkeley, California, in honor of Judge Mario G. Olmos, a former judge, community leader and graduate of Boalt Hall Law School who died an untimely death at the age of 43.

The offending section of the speech is this: “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.” This passage inspired Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives and potential 2012 presidential candidate, to call Judge Sotomayor “a Latina racist.”

To lift one statement out of Judge Sotomayor’s eight-page speech without examining the context and substance of her remarks, is an example of the kind of shoddy character assassination that I suspect will dominate this judicial confirmation process.

Judge Sotomayor’s speech is, in fact, an excellent meditation on how the experiences of judges might affect how they approach aspects of judicial decision-making. It explores the important, and too-little examined reality that judicial deliberations can be affected by a judge’s background, perspective and experience.

In the next sentence immediately following the passage above, Judge Sotomayor says, “Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice [Benjamin] Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society.”

Could she have been referring to Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case in which Justice Holmes—widely regarded as perhaps the most brilliant justice in the Supreme Court’s history—upheld the state’s plan to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old white woman, who was accused of being congenitally retarded. Buck’s main crime seems to have been the fact that she’d had a child out of wedlock.

In any case, Justice Holmes upheld the sterilization order, emphatically and coldly stating, “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Does anyone seriously believe that a woman, and especially a woman of color “with the richness of her experiences” would not have “reach[ed] a better conclusion” than that adopted by Justice Holmes in 1927?

In fact Buck v. Bell is the perfect example of how a “wise old [white] man” got it wrong in a way that a woman judge or a racial minority most likely would not.

It’s worth pointing out that in that same speech Judge Sotomayor cautioned, “we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group.” But she acknowledges that “there may be some [difference in her judging] based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

What Gingrich and others decry in Judge Sotomayor should be applauded. Judge Sotomayor has the humility to recognize the difficulty of achieving true and pure impartiality. Instead, as she pointed out in her speech, “[t]he aspiration to impartiality is just that—it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.”

Unlike so many judges who by virtue of being white and male simply assume their impartiality, Judge Sotomayor recognizes that all judges are affected by their background and their life experiences.

Ironically, it was Justice Cardozo who recognized this when he said, “[t]he great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men, do not turn aside in their course, and pass the judge by.” Justice Cardozo concluded that “[n]o effort or revolution of the mind will overthrow utterly and at all times the empire of … [a judge’s] subconscious loyalties.

These are the realities of judicial decision-making evoked by Judge Sotomayor’s speech. It’s perhaps easier to say as [then-Supreme Court nominee] Clarence Thomas so famously did, that a judge can simply, “strip down like a runner,” and become utterly impartial simply by putting on a black robe. But it is more honest to acknowledge that regardless of race, gender, ideology or professional background, impartiality is always a work-in-progress for judges.

Even Judge Richard Posner, a conservative stalwart on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals once observed that, “Litigation commonly involves persons at different social distances form the judge, and the more proximate will garner the more sympathetic response regardless of actual desert.”

Justice Thomas is the perfect example of how hard it can be for a judge to lay aside the personal experiences that shape his worldview. His views about the affirmative action cases that come before him are shaped quite clearly by what he regards as the self-sufficient dignity of his hard-working grandfather and the humiliation he says he felt when others believed his scholarly accomplishments were the result of affirmative action.

White judges are also shaped by their background and experiences. They needn’t ever speak of it, simply because their whiteness and gender insulates them from the presumption of partiality and bias that is regularly attached to women judges and judges of color when it comes to matters of race and gender.

Only a judge who is conscious and fully engaged with the reality of how her experiences may bear on her approach to the facts of a case, or sense of social justice, or vision of constitutional interpretation, should be entrusted to sit on the most influential and powerful court in our nation.

Too often we have allowed ourselves to be placated and charmed by fantasies about umpire judges calling “balls and strikes,” without ever asking which league the game is being played in or whether the umpire was standing in the best position to see the play. We forget that when deciding whether a batter checked his swing, the homeplate umpire will routinely ask for the alternative perspective from the first or third base umpire before calling a “swing and a miss” a strike.

Judge Sotomayor rightly suggests that these things matter. She notes in her speech that “personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.” She should know this. She’s been a trial judge. None of the other justices who will serve with Judge Sotomayor will have had that experience.

Judge Sotomayor’s speech is one of the most honest and compelling statements about judicial impartiality we’re likely to hear from a judge of her stature.

It ends with this humble observation:

“Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I re-evaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

It’s entirely appropriate to question Judge Sotomayor about this speech at her confirmation hearings. She is evidently more than capable of explaining in compelling, clear language what precisely she wanted to convey in this speech. But Judge Sotomayor is not a racist.

It is an insult of unimaginable proportion to unleash this charge on her, based on one sentence from her Berkeley, California, speech. It is not just irresponsible to make this charge against a sitting federal appeals court judge based on this flimsy record; it is—and here I’ll break the taboo—racist to do so.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sherrilyn Ifill.

6777: Sotomayor Called Racist By Racists.

From The New York Daily News…

GOP Holy Trinity on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: She’s a ‘racist’

Daily News Staff

Never ones to shy away from a fight—even a losing one—the Holy Trinity of the GOP—Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh—have taken to calling the Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor a ‘racist,’ with Gingrich even going so far as to ask her to withdraw.

The anger is aimed at comments Sotomayor made at a University of California-Berkeley lecture in 2001. “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,” Sotomayor said.

In a Twitter post Wednesday afternoon, Gingrich wrote, “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman’ new racism is no better than old racism.”

“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw,” he added. “Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter echoed Gingrich on Wednesday’s “Good Morning America.”

“It does a disservice to minorities—to women and minorities—that we are supposed to be empathizing for,” she said. “Saying that someone would decide a case differently… because she’s a Latina, not a white male, that statement by definition is racist.”

Immediately after the announcement on Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh was the first to started banging the war drum by calling Sotomayor a “horrible choice” and “a racist … or reverse racist.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs quickly and easily threw water on the conservative fire.

“I think we’re satisfied that, when the people of America and the people of the Senate get a chance to look at more than just the blog of a former lawmaker… that they’ll come to the same conclusion that the president did,” Gibbs said. “I think when people get a chance to look at her record, I feel certain that partisan politics will… take a backseat to common sense and open-minded decisions based on a full examination of the record. And I think that’s what every Supreme Court and every judicial nominee deserves.”

6772: Bracelets And Benches.

Looking for a job in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• A couple of entrepreneurs have created bracelets that announce you’re unemployed. The hope is that wearing the bracelets will lead to conversations and even networking opportunities. You’d think one could communicate their unemployment status by simply wearing a depressed and destitute facial expression.

• President Barack Obama nominated federal judge Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. If approved, Sotomayor will be the first Latino member on the high court—as well as the second female in the current group. Which undoubtedly delights Clarence Thomas.