Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s flagrant DEI choice for the Court, is a poor jurist and one of the weakest SCOTUS intellects ever, as her Ethics Alarms dossier makes depressingly clear and as she makes clear herself every time she authors a dissent or a concurring opinion. Nonetheless, I’m 100% in her corner as the desperate Left tries to push her into resigning so Biden and the narrow Democrat majority in the Senate can put a 28-year-old transgender Muslim midget of color in her place.
Sotomayor is a target ostensibly because shes 70 (a spring chicken in Supreme Court demographics), diabetic and had one parent who died at a young age, so there is a non-negligible chance that she may shuffle off this mortal coil after Biden vacates the White House, allowing the evil Donald Trump to appoint Darth Vader to the Court or someone similar. This may be part of the reasoning, but I strongly suspect that progressives know that The Great and Powerful O screwed up and selected a liberal justice who lacked the gravitas and acumen to do battle with the SCOTUS conservative majority beyond metaphorically crooning “Feelings,” which is what the “wise Latina” is all about.
Well, tough. The Left made their bed by confirming Sonia, and they are stuck with her. It serves them right for placing ethnicity over scholarship and competence in such an important government institution.
Even beyond that, Sotomayor has a life appointment, and there is no reason why she should take a dive for political expediency. At 70, she’s right in the middle of the Court on the actuarial tables. Being diabetic isn’t a death sentence today, and the Left’s hammering at the fact that her father perished of a heart attack at 42 is a particularly transparent and cynical ploy. Nate Silver, again revealing his partisan stripes, issued a substack pseudo-scientific argument concluding, “Sotomayor should retire. This is a much higher-stakes decision than nearly everything else I’ll discuss in the newsletter this year. And it is not a close call.”
No, Nate. You and your progressive cronies want her to retire for strategic political reasons. Although the Court’s decisions often have political significance, and though appointments to the Court are increasingly politically important, Sotomayor’s job, duty and function is not political, nor is the Supreme Court a political institution. The Justice is certainly a Democrat, but she isn’t on the Court to be a Democrat. She is there to be a legal arbiter who rules according to law, not party loyalties. So far, she is resisting the unethical pressure on her, and she should.
It is not a parallel situation with the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Democrats are still furious at post-mortem for holding on to her SCOTUS seat until she died at 87 instead of quitting in time to let Obama replace her. Ginsburg was indeed irresponsible. She had cancer, was falling asleep during oral arguments, and 87 isn’t 70, which wouldn’t even be retirement age if the law kept up with reality. Furthermore, isn’t it hilariously hypocritical for the same people who are propping up Joe Biden and prepared to nominate him for a second term while proclaiming his mental and physical fitness to be telling Sonia that she’s a bad risk?
I’d bet my worldly goods that Sotomayor could clobber Joe in Scrabble with half her brain tied behind her back.
You go, girl!
Ethics Alarms 
Of course it’s hypocritical. That never stopped the left (or the right, for that matter) from talking out of both sides of its mouth. Let’s also not forget, in addition to being pissed at the notorious RBG, the left is still VERY annoyed at former Justice Kennedy for stepping down in 2018, removing their crucial swing vote on civil rights issues and allowing the evil Trump to put rapist bro Kavanaugh on the court. They already pushed Breyer into solidifying his plans to retire so Biden could put Brown on the court and check another box, now they are worried that Biden won’t win in November and the court’s narrow liberal minority will be eroded further. The idea of packing the court failed badly, so this is what they are reduced to.
Why do these tactics suddenly feel only slightly removed from those used in Grisham’s “The Pelican Brief?”
This kind of thinking is extremely dangerous because of the slippery slope it creates to some truly evil ways to reshape the Court..
The thinking and tactics of the Democrats become more like the Junior High School Student Council every day. In Chicago, the ‘law and order’ Democratic DA candidate was ahead by 10,000 votes the day after the election. Then, 10,000 mail-in votes were ‘discovered’ and every single one was for the other candidate. In Dalton, Il, Lori Lightfoot has been appointed to investigate all the insane illegalities of ‘Super Mayor’ Tiffany Henyard at $400/hour. The investigation may not happen because Henyard has stated that she will not pay Lightfoot and Lightfoot won’t investigate if she isn’t paid.
So, if you want to flagrantly rule as a dictator, run the election for your own recall illegally so the recall vote is thrown out by the judge and refuse to pay for the person appointed to investigate your wrongdoings.
What should be pointed out long and loud is that the SCOTUS is not a partisan governmental body. When the world starts believing that our courts are not impartial our system of justice is at risk. We have already begun down that slippery slope and we should be asking those in charge why the hell they want to destroy trust in the justice system.
I would say we have more than just begun. When you look at 2nd Amendment cases, you see it is VERY partisan. Think of the poor Idaho and Montana people stuck in the 9th circuit.
I really can’t gloat about Democrats being stuck with someone who, like Sotomayor, lacks the gravitas and acumen of other SC justices. We want gravitas and acumen. We want impartial decisions based on rules. They don’t care about all that. Sotomayor is everything the Left wants, except for “born this century”. Her judicial philosophy is almost pure “pragmatism”, which is to say “ruling according to whatever policy she thinks will yield the best outcome”, which is basically indistinguishable from legislating. And of course her notion of what policy will yield the best outcome is in lockstep with the Democratic Party.