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Sotomayor Would Be Sixth Catholic Justice, but the Pigeonholing Ends There – NYTimes.com
Sotomayor Would Be Sixth Catholic Justice, but the Pigeonholing Ends There – NYTimes.com.
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, she will be the sixth of the nine justices who are Roman Catholic — a stunning robed portrait in a country where Catholics were once targets of discrimination and suspicion.
Four of the Catholics on the court are reported to be committed attenders of Mass, and they make up the court’s solid conservative bloc — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The fifth Catholic, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, often votes with them.
There are indications that Judge Sotomayor is more like the majority of American Catholics: those who were raised in the faith and shaped by its values, but who do not attend Mass regularly and are not particularly active in religious life. Like many Americans, Judge Sotomayor may be what religion scholars call a “cultural Catholic” — a category that could say something about her political and social attitudes.
Interviews with more than a dozen of Judge Sotomayor’s friends from high school, college, law school and professional life said they had never heard her talk about her faith, and had no recollection of her ever going to Mass or belonging to a parish. Her family did not return phone calls for comment.
A White House spokesman, speaking on background, put it this way: “She currently does not belong to a particular parish or church, but she attends church with family and friends for important occasions.”
Many of Judge Sotomayor’s friends and colleagues also said they believed that her expressed commitment to social justice and community service is a reflection of her Catholic upbringing.
“In law school, it was very clear she was committed to serving the community and using the law as an instrument of service to the greater good,” said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law who is on leave to help establish a law school at the University of California, Irvine. “That’s a mark of religion, even if she didn’t say so.”
Studies have consistently shown that the 57 percent of Catholics who rarely or never attend Mass are far more liberal on political and cultural issues than Catholics who attend weekly or at least once a month.
In fact, 52 percent of Catholics who do not attend church regularly say abortion is morally acceptable, compared with 24 percent of churchgoing Catholics, according to a Gallup study released in March based on polling over the previous three years. Gallup found that 61 percent of non-churchgoing Catholics found same-sex relationships morally acceptable, compared with 44 percent of churchgoers.
But legal scholars say that while Judge Sotomayor’s Catholic identity will undoubtedly shape her perceptions, they will not determine how she would rule on the bench. After all, they point out, Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Frank Murphy, both Catholics, had records as liberals, while Justice Scalia has been a reliable conservative. Their positions have differed, even on issues covered in Catholic teaching, like abortion.
“I don’t think there is any one Catholic stance on the law,” said M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame. “Catholicism is a big tent, so different people are drawn to different aspects of it. A Dorothy Day Catholic is going to be different than an Opus Dei Catholic,” she said. (Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement that promotes justice for the poor; Opus Dei is a church prelature that promotes personal orthodoxy.)
“You’ll have judges who are pro-life personally who are going to rule that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land,” Ms. Kaveny said. “People recognize that the task of the judge is different than the task of a lawmaker.”
After her father died, Judge Sotomayor was brought up in the Bronx by her mother. She attended Cardinal Spellman High School, an academically rigorous Catholic school, in an era when boys and girls were segregated.
But it was also in the era after the Second Vatican Council, when the church was opening to modern culture. Mass at Spellman High was accompanied by a guitar, and girls were asking why they could not be altar servers, said Jane Morris, who knew Judge Sotomayor while both were student council leaders.
“We were allowed and encouraged to ask a lot of questions,” said Ms. Morris, who is now the girls athletic director at Spellman High. “We were asking, what’s wrong with the other religions, and why do you say everybody else is going to Hell?”
At Princeton, where Judge Sotomayor belonged to a Puerto Rican student group, a group of Latino students attended Mass every week, but she was not among them, a former classmate recalled.
Judge Sotomayor married her boyfriend from high school, Kevin E. Noonan, in a small chapel at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in the summer of 1976, after both graduated from college, according to a friend of Judge Sotomayor. But within seven years they were divorced, and it is not known whether she obtained a marriage annulment from the church. She has not remarried and has no children.
As a Hispanic Catholic, Judge Sotomayor is part of the church’s most vibrant and growing wing. Hispanic Catholics, studies show, are more liberal than white Catholics on some social and economic issues, like immigration and health care reform, but more conservative on homosexuality and abortion.
Justice Scalia, whose son is a Catholic priest, and Justice Alito are of Italian Catholic ancestry. Justice Thomas is an African-American convert who once went to seminary, left the church for 28 years and rejoined in the mid-1990s.
Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at the University of Texas, Austin, said Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito are “Catholic and movement conservatives.”
“That combination is just golden for being anti-abortion and anti-affirmative action,” said Mr. Powe, author of “The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008” (March 2009, Harvard University Press).
Justice Kennedy, who wrote two decisions favoring equal rights for gay people, is a “country club Republican,” which Mr. Powe described as “an economic conservative without some of the social conservatism.”
The court’s liberal wing is made up of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, who are Jewish, and John Paul Stevens, a Protestant.
The Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, a Jesuit priest and the former president of Fordham University, who came to know Judge Sotomayor when they both served on the New York City Campaign Finance Board in the 1980s, said: “I just don’t think Sonia would fit in with Roberts, exactly, and certainly not Scalia. I think they’re very different Catholics.”
Sotomayor Nomination is like Opportunity Knocking
Sotomayor Nomination is like Opportunity Knocking
RegularFolksUnited.com: The Bully Pulpit for Regular Folks.
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 5:40 PM EDT, 5:40 PM EDT from Bjaffe
Once again, opportunity is knocking at the doors of the Republican Party. Actually, it’s banging on the door, as Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor presents the party a perfect opportunity to galvanize the base, take a strong stand on principle and to make their case about the role of the judiciary to the American People. Even more importantly, this is a chance to stand for all that is right and good in America. The odds are strongly stacked against the GOP actually doing the right thing here – most of them will likely end up voting for her out of fear of the dreaded “extremist” or “obstructionist” labels – but for any of them that might actually possess a backbone, this is a fantastic chance to become relevant again and reconnect with the people.
In the past, I would have said we need to let President Obama get his judicial appointee for the fact that he won the election. This is the consequence of losing; the winners get what they want. However, as the Democrats repeatedly reminded us during the Bush years, this is simply not the case. When it comes to judges, the minority party retains the right to ensure only “mainstream” candidates get fair consideration and an actual up or down vote. The battle lines have been drawn; they were defined clearly by the Democrats over the past eight years, and now it is time for the Republicans to get in the game and play by those rules. As Sen. Chuck Schumer said, the President does not always get what he wants, and the Senate is there to act as a “cooling saucer” for decisions made in the heat of the moment.
The fact is, Judge Sotomayor lacks the most basic qualifications to sit on the highest court in the land. To become a Supreme Court Justice, a person must recite an oath as stipulated under Article VI of the Constitution. The passage reads “…all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution…” Based on her own words regarding the role of the judiciary, Judge Sotomayor fails this basic tenet, as she does not support or uphold the Constitution.
In 2005, speaking with potential law clerks, she said “…a court of appeals is where policy is made.” To compound this, she then acknowledged that she should not have said that on tape, with a wink and a nod, and practically rolled her eyes as she said she does not advocate or endorse making law from the bench. But she spoke the truth; to her, the court is simply another avenue to enact policies that cannot be achieved through legislative – constitutional – means. To Judge Sotomayor, the court is a place where the downtrodden can find comfort and past wrongs against minorities can be righted. This is a woman whose inability to exercise jurisprudence is apparent based on her abysmal record before the Supreme Court, the very body she is now nominated to serve on. Six cases that she has been involved in ruling on as an appellate judge have gone before the nation’s highest court, and five of them were reversed. In the one case that was not reversed, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the reasoning she used to arrive at her decision.
President Obama himself cited reasons for selecting Judge Sotomayor that have nothing to do with upholding the law and everything to do with changing our fundamental structure from a nation of laws to a nation of men. He has emphasized the importance of empathy, and understanding, rather than applying the law equally to all who stand before the court. Judge Sotomayor has been presented as someone who can do this, someone who does not come from a life of privilege and can bring a different perspective to the Supreme Court. This completely ignores the facts, as Justice Clarence Thomas comes for a background of poverty himself. He was born and raised in the South, and lived in a time before the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s came about. Certainly, Justice Thomas offers a different perspective as well, does he not? Unlike Judge Sotomayor though, Thomas believes in the Constitution as it was written by the founders.
This idea of empathy and understanding guiding a Judge’s decision making is not only unethical, it is also unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment, one of the left’s favorite weapons against state and individual sovereignty, guarantees all people equal protection under the law, regardless of ethnicity or background. The idea is that justice is blind and makes no distinction between white, black, Asian, Hispanic, wealthy, poor, tall, short, or any other difference we can think of. This is what equality in America is all about; that each person is treated equally by the law. President Obama likes to speak of equality, and the need to make things fair for people by using the government to create equality, but appointing judges who will not treat those before them as equal, and will inject their own biases and preferences into their decision making does the exact opposite – it creates a system where, as Orwell would say, some are more equal than others.
Unfortunately, while there is a legitimate case to be made that Judge Sotomayor is not qualified for this position, and lacks the temperance to sit on the nation’s highest court, the dreaded “Race Card” is still in play and will cow many Republicans into submission. Judge Sotomayor is the first Hispanic woman to be nominated for the Supreme Court, and Republicans fear that opposing her will drive away Hispanic voters and give the Democrats ammunition to label them as racists and hate-mongers.
When, not if, that happens, the GOP needs to be armed and ready to counterattack with equal ferocity. If they want to play race games, we need to be ready to remind the nation of just which party filibustered and fought the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Or how about the Democrats’ endless filibuster of Miguel Estrada – who could have been the first Latino nominated to the Supreme Court had his appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court gone through. And the Democrats made it clear that they wanted to stop Estrada from making it to the circuit court out of fear that he would be nominated for the next Supreme Court vacancy.
We cannot allow ourselves to always be on the defensive in these matters. The Republican Party holds no monopoly when it comes to attacking minority candidates for cabinet positions or court appointments. As the attacks keep coming, we need to keep bringing up their own transgression against them. Let’s not forget how the Democrats savaged Alberto Gonzalez – the first Latino Attorney General in American history – every day over a phony scandal in which no laws were broken. Let’s dig up the left wing racist cartoons depicting Condoleezza Rice. These cartoons were described by the Independent Women’s Forum as “…an Ebonics speaking, big lipped, Black mammy who just loves her ‘massa.’” We can even look further back, and bring up the way the Democrats scuttled the nomination of Linda Chavez – the first Hispanic woman nominated to the United States cabinet. The left decried her as not being “culturally authentic.
When playing the race card, the Democrats do not have clean hands at all; they have been more than willing to viciously attack and destroy minority nominees who happen to be Republican. It is time to stop letting them get away with it and stop accepting all the blame for a tactic they frequently engage in. It is time to stand up and fight back, and when the Democrats launch their opening Salvo, to be ready to hit back and hit hard.
God in Government: Anti-Abortion Groups Gear Up to Fight Sotomayor – On Faith at washingtonpost.com
God in Government: Anti-Abortion Groups Gear Up to Fight Sotomayor – On Faith at washingtonpost.com.
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Groups opposed to legalized abortion had already been aiming at Judge Sonia Sotomayor as one of President Obama’s likely Supreme Court nominees, and now that her nomination is official, they still don’t like what they see.
Americans United for Life, one of the nation’s oldest anti-abortion groups, has been conducting opposition research on her since her name surfaced.
This morning, AUL was one of the first such groups out of the blocks with reaction to news of her nomination. AUL president Charmaine Yoest blasted the choice, saying it nixed any possibility of finding “common ground” on the abortion issue, a goal of Obama and a number of progressive religious groups.
“For all the President’s talk of finding ‘common ground,’ this appointment completely contradicts that hollow promise. She believes the role of the Court is to set policy which is exactly the philosophy that led to the Supreme Court turning into the ‘National Abortion Control Board…'”
The group said its research shows that Sotomayor has never directly decided whether a law regulating abortion was constitutional, but she has decided a few cases that indirectly implicate abortion rights. It points out that Sotomayor upheld the Mexico City policy, which prohibited funding to international family planning groups that provide abortions. Obama reversed that ban shortly after taking office.
Keep in mind that groups firmly opposed to any compromise on the abortion (and that includes groups opposed to restrictions on abortion) have already expressed skepticism on the “common ground” approach to abortion. But we’ll keep an eye out for how other religous groups, on all sides of the issue, respond to her nomination. Keep checking back here on GIG.
UPDATE: On his blog, Christian broadcaster David Brody has an analysis of Sotomayor’s Mexico City opinion. He thinks there isn’t enough there for anti-abortion groups to hang their hats on.
“Initially, it looks like the abortion issue may not derail Sotomayor. That’s good news for President Obama. The last thing he needs is a fight over abortion. Pro-choice groups may feel a bit queasy on this because she actually hasn’t ruled on the constitutionality of abortion but you would think they have to feel that her liberal leanings will point her in the ‘right direction.’ Taking the abortion issue off the table (for the most part) is an astute political move.”
Supreme Court Rules Former Detainee Lawsuit Cannot Proceed – washingtonpost.com
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 18, 2009; 12:15 PM
The Supreme Court ruled today that former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller may not be sued by Arab Muslims who were seized in this country after the 2001 terrorist attacks and allege harsh treatment because of their religion and ethnicity.
The court ruled 5 to 4 that the top officials are not liable for the actions of their subordinates absent evidence that they ordered the allegedly discriminatory activity. The decision followed the court’s ideological split between conservatives and liberals, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy siding with the conservatives and writing the opinion.
In a separate decision, the court ruled that women who worked for companies whose maternity leave policies were discriminatory cannot sue under today’s laws that make such policies illegal. In a case involving AT&T, the court ruled 7 to 2 that such policies were “bona fide” at the time, and women may not challenge them retroactively.
The suit against Ashcroft and Mueller was brought by a Pakistani citizen living legally in the country when he was arrested in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Javaid Iqbal was held in solitary confinement in a section of a Brooklyn prison known as Admax-Shu, for “administrative maximum special housing unit,” where he said he was subjected to numerous beatings and strip searches. He was convicted of document fraud and deported to Pakistan but cleared of any involvement in terrorism. An Egyptian Muslim who was also part of the suit, Ehad Elmaghraby, settled with the government for $300,000. Similar suits are pending.
Iqbal’s case names prison guards, FBI agents, the warden of the prison — who was the subject of a critical report from the Justice Department inspector general — up to Ashcroft, who was attorney general at the time of the attack. Iqbal says policies formulated by Ashcroft and Mueller singled him out as a suspect of “high interest” solely because of his nationality and religion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York acknowledged that top government officials carry immunity but decided it was at least “plausible” that Ashcroft and Mueller were responsible for, or knew about, the discriminatory actions Iqbal alleges.
It said the suit could go forward with evidence-gathering from the lower-level officials in the case, and then a judge could decide whether there was reason to keep the two top officials in the suit.
But Kennedy said that decision was wrong, and Iqbal had no plausible claims that Ashcroft and Mueller knew of or put in place a discriminatory policy.
His claims “amount to nothing more than a formulaic recitation of the elements of a constitutional discrimination claim,” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy said it was logical that the largest law enforcement investigation in the nation’s history focused on Arab Muslims because of the identities of the Sept. 11 attackers.
“It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims,” he wrote.
Similarly, it was not discriminatory that Iqbal and others were detained in a maximum security prison, Kennedy said. “All it plausibly suggests is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”
Justice David H. Souter wrote for the dissenters. He said the conservative majority went further to insulate public officials from civil liability than Ashcroft and Mueller had even asked for.
via Supreme Court Rules Former Detainee Lawsuit Cannot Proceed – washingtonpost.com.
SCOTUS Showdown: The Voting Rights Act by Hans A. von Spakovsky on National Review Online
SCOTUS Showdown: The Voting Rights Act by Hans A. von Spakovsky on National Review Online.
By Hans A. von Spakovsky
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Today, in Washington, Justice Department lawyers will tell the Supreme Court that the South is still so permeated with racism that it cannot be trusted to run its elections without prior approval — from Justice Department lawyers. On those dubious grounds, they will urge the Court to uphold Section 5 of the LBJ-era Voting Rights Act — a “temporary/emergency” provision that is now 44 years old. The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. Lawyers for the district, population about 3,500, will argue that Congress’s 2006 renewal of Section 5 was unconstitutional; and if the justices base their decision purely on the law and the applicable facts, they will agree. But race is the eternal third rail of politics in Washington, and the reaction to a finding that any portion of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional would be so fierce that the Court may shy away from doing what it should. The 1965 Voting Rights Act contains two important, but distinctly different, provisions. Section 2 prohibits the denial of voting rights based on “race or color.” It’s a permanent, nationwide provision. Section 5, however, was supposedly a temporary measure that applied only to a small number of states (most of them in the South). It provided that, if those covered states wanted to enact any law that affected voting in any way, they would have to get approval from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division (or a federal court in Washington, D.C.) before the law could take effect. Initially in force for five years, Section 5 was renewed in 1970, 1975, 1982 and then, in 2006, for another 25 years.
There’s no question that Section 5 was legal and necessary in 1965, a time of fire hoses, police dogs, and bullhorns. Some state and local governments were still systematically trying to prevent blacks from voting, and they were creative in devising new ways to discriminate. Section 5 effectively prevented these states and localities from passing new legislation intended to get around federal law and court orders. This means that the nine fully covered states, and certain specified localities in seven other states, still labor under strict pre-approval requirements based on decades-old voting data. In 2006 Congress refused to update the formula to reflect current registration and turnout data. If it had, almost none of these jurisdictions would have been covered. Turnout of black voters equals or surpasses that of white voters in many of the covered states, clear evidence that the “temporary/emergency” measure is no longer needed and the widespread discrimination of 1965 is long gone. Race relations have changed dramatically in the last two generations, especially in the South. In 1965 black elected officials were virtually unknown in the covered states; today they number in the thousands. In covered states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, 31 to 45 percent of Democratic state legislators are black. Of the ten states with the largest number of black elected officials in 2001, eight — Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Michigan — are covered fully or partly under Section 5. Over the years, objections to state election-law changes have dwindled. The Civil Rights Division receives thousands of submissions — such as measures to open new polling places — every year. Since 1965, the division has objected to only 1 percent of all submissions. In the past ten years, the objections have run about 0.2 percent. Such a low rate can hardly justify continuing the extensive intrusion into a state’s lawmaking ability, particularly when you consider the dubiousness of many of the division’s objections: In case after case, courts have overturned the positions taken by the Civil Rights Division. What makes the situation even worse is that Section 5 reverses the usual standard that requires the federal government to prove discrimination. Instead, the submitting jurisdiction must prove that its proposed change would not have a discriminatory effect. That’s a very tough standard that can be made even tougher by opposition from partisan career lawyers at the Civil Rights Division. Too often they use Section 5 to try to stop laws (for example, ones requiring voters to show ID) that they find politically objectionable, while ignoring applicable legal standards. Most covered jurisdictions don’t have the resources to fight the Civil Rights Division, even when it is clearly in the wrong. That is why organizations that serve minority groups love Section 5. Unlike with Section 2, they don’t have to prove a case in court to stop redistricting plans or other legislation they don’t like; they just call their friends and former colleagues at the Civil Rights Division and tell them to object. More than one court decision has noted the embarrassing and highly unethical coordination between the Civil Rights Division and such outside groups. Based on any reasonable statistical measure, the difference in voter participation between covered and uncovered states has disappeared. The “legislative record” developed by Congress in 2006 deliberately stayed away from exploring the differences in minority office-holding rates and voter turnout between covered and noncovered states — because doing so would have shown there was no basis for extending the law. Even the relatively small number of voting-discrimination cases filed under Section 2 show the exact opposite of what the proponents of Section 5 would like: More Section 2 cases are filed in states that are not covered under Section 5. No one can truthfully assert that state governments in Virginia and Georgia are still racist and full of defiant government officials, particularly when compared with noncovered neighboring states such as Pennsylvania and Tennessee. There is no difference that justifies such an intrusive and extraordinary law. Given all these developments, it should be easy for the Supreme Court to make the right decision on this case. A renewal based on 40-year-old evidence that studiously ignored seismic changes in our society, elections, and democratic institutions should not stand. But, afraid of being labeled racist, a cowardly Congress renewed Section 5 just three years ago. Let’s hope the justices have the courage to do what Congress did not: consider the applicable facts and law, and do the right thing. —Hans A. von Spakovsky, a visiting legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, was formerly a member of the Federal Election Commission and a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department.
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