Having lost the Congress in 2006 and the White
House in 2008, Republicans are looking to redefine themselves for a nation
that still leans conservative but is less Republican that it has been in
decades.
The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the
U.S. Supreme Court presents just such an opportunity. For, even if the
party loses the battle and Sotomayor sits on the court, it can win the
war, as Ronald Reagan won the Panama Canal debate, even as Senate
Republicans committed collective suicide by voting to give away the canal.
What are the grounds for rejecting Sonia
Sotomayor?
No one has brought forth the slightest evidence
she has the intellectual candlepower to sit on the Roberts court. By her
own admission, Sotomayor is an "affirmative action baby."
Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her
brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law
Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning
to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.
Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that,
to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was
advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar books during
her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your
summer reading consists of "Chicken Little" and "The Troll Under the
Bridge"?
In video clips dating back 25 years, and now
provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor, according to the
Times, even calls herself an "affirmative action product."
"The clips include lengthy remarks about her
experiences as an ‘affirmative action baby,’ whose lower test scores were
overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law
School because, she said, she is Hispanic and had grown up in poor
circumstance."
"If we had gone through the traditional numbers
route of those institutions," says Sotomayor, "it would have been highly
questionable if I would have been accepted. … My test scores were not
comparable to that of my classmates."
Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1
ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law
Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League
institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a
lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their
consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into
discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as
beneficiaries.
One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was
honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated "with the base
alloy of hypocrisy."
As the Times reports, on the tapes, Sotomayor
rejects "the proposition that minorities must become advocates of
’selection by merit alone.’ She said diversity improved the legal system."
"‘Since I have difficultly defining merit and
what merit alone means, and … whether it’s judicial or otherwise, I accept
that different experiences, in and of itself, bring merit to the system,’
she said, adding, ‘I think it brings to the system more of a sense of
fairness when these litigants see people like myself on the bench."
What does the latest Times revelation tell us?
That were it not for Ivy League dishonesty,
Sotomayor would not have gotten into Princeton, would never have been
ranked first in her class, would not have gotten into Yale Law, nor been
named editor of Yale Law Review, and thus would not be a U.S. Appellate
court judge today or a nominee to the Supreme Court.
Indeed, the White House itself leaked that the
final four court candidates were all women and Sotomayor was picked
because she was a Latina.
One wonders how many superior students and judges
have been passed over to advance Sonia Sotomayor’s career?
From college days to court days, that career
reflects, in word and deed, a determination to use any power she achieves
to create a society where the demands of diversity triumph over the ideal
of equal justice under law. For Sotomayor, the advancement of people of
color over white males is justice.
Republican senators should use this Sotomayor
nomination to put affirmative action in the dock for what it is —
race-based bigotry against white males so that persons of color can
receive the rewards of society that they could not win in free and fair
competition.
Lay out the Sotomayor record — SAT scores, LSAT
scores, bar exam score, law review articles and her opinions — so that we
can see up close what those who eviscerated Robert Bork regard as academic
and judicial excellence.
No need for name-calling.
Just lay out the lady’s opinions and record, so
that, if she is elevated, Americans can say: Barack Obama voted against
Chief Justice Roberts because Roberts could not measure up to Sonia
Sotomayor, his ideal of what a justice ought to be.