‘Out of Context’ (Thomas Sowell)

In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification" when people realize what was said. The clearly racist comments made by Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Berkeley campus in 2001 have forced the spinmasters to resort to their last-ditch excuse, that it was "taken out of context."

If that line is used during Judge Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings, someone should ask her to explain just what those words mean when taken in context.

What could such statements possibly mean — in any context — other than the new and fashionable racism of our time, rather than the old-fashioned racism of earlier times? Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.

Looked at in the context of Judge Sotomayor's voting to dismiss the appeal of white firefighters who were denied the promotions they had earned by passing an exam, because not enough minorities passed that exam to create "diversity," her words in Berkeley seem to match her actions on the judicial bench in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals all too well.

The Supreme Court of the United States thought that case was important enough to hear it, even though the three-judge panel on which Judge Sotomayor served gave it short shrift in less than a page. Apparently the famous "empathy" that President Obama says a judge should have does not apply to white males in Judge Sotomayor's court.

The very idea that a judge's "life experiences" should influence judicial decisions is as absurd as it is dangerous.

It is dangerous because citizens are supposed to obey the law, which means they must know what the law is in advance —

OUT OF CONTEXT???

Keep the Obama-Biden supreme court nominees in check. Hold VP Biden to the charges he unjustly levelled against Justice Clarence Thomas during his own Supreme Court nomination:

Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said. ”I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would strike down laws restricting property rights.” That caught me off guard, and I had no recollection of making so atypical a statement, which shook me up even more. “Now, it would seem to me what you were talking about,” Senator Biden went on to say, “is you find it attractive the fact that they are activists and they would like to strike down existing laws that impact on restricting the use of property rights, because you know, that is what they write about.”
Since I didn’t remember making the statement in the first place, I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say in reply was that “it has been some time since I have read Professor Macedo … But I don’t believe that in my writings I have indicated that we should have an activist Supreme Court.” It was, I knew, a weak answer. Fortunately, though, the young lawyers who had helped prepare me for the hearing had loaded all of my speeches into a computer and at the first break in the proceedings they looked this one up. The senator, they found, had wrenched my words out of context. I looked at the text and saw that the passage he’d read out loud had been immediately followed by two other sentences: “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self-government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.” The point I’d been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.

pp 235-236 of "My Grandfather's Son" by Clarence Thomas

SUPREME COURT

Since its founding in 1979, the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), has submitted testimony on every nominee to the United States Supreme Court, with one exception, to the United States Senate considering the nominee. This is a record that we are proud of. Now, we face the daunting task of trying to stop a left-wing, bully, of a Federal Appellate Court Judge from being able to force her agenda on this nation for decades!

WHY? Because Barack Obama has Nominated a RADICAL Federal Appellate Court Judge to replace liberal Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court — Click Here to Tell the Senate to REJECT Obama’s Radical Bully of a Supreme Court Nominee

President Barack Obama has picked his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court... and she turns out to be the MOST RADICAL JUDICIAL ACTIVIST of ANY of the “short list” of potential nominees leaked to the liberal media, and, according to liberal media reports, she is a bully!

Can we STOP the nomination of radical judicial activist Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor? YES — but only if YOU join your voice with USJF and hundreds of thousands of others, demanding that she be rejected!

There are serious problems with the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor that every single U.S. Senator NEEDS to look at when considering her for this high position. Here’s the biggest one:

The Supreme Court itself says that this woman is WRONG!

Judge Sotomayor has a TERRIBLE record as a Circuit Court judge, of being REVERSED by the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, she has a 60% reversal rate as a Court of Appeals judge!

You read that right: 3 out of 5 of Judge Sotomayor’s decisions as a Circuit Court Judge that have been appealed have been overturned by the United State Supreme Court!

If the U.S. Supreme Court says this Judge is wrong, HOW CAN THE U.S. SENATE SAY THAT SHE IS RIGHT???

The answer is, they should NOT. But it’s up to US — YOU AND ME — to take that message to them!

Even pundits on the left are critical of Mr. Obama’s pick of Judge Sotomayor. Jeffrey Rosen, writing in the liberal magazine, The New Republic, discussed his investigation of her background, writing, “I’ve been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.” Going further, Rosen writes:
Going further, Rosen writes: The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.” (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, “Will you please stop talking and let them talk?”)
And even the liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen expressed shock and disappointment at Sotomayor’s recent approval in Ricci v. DeStefano of the city of New Haven’s racial quota system and its decision to deny 18 firefighters their earned promotions — based on their skin color. This even provoked her own colleague, Judge Jose Cabranes (a fellow Clinton appointee) to object to the panel’s opinion that contained “no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case!”

Barack Obama threatened during the 2008 presidential campaign to nominate liberal judicial activists who would push their left-wing policy preferences, instead of simply following the U. S. Constitution. In selecting Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court nominee, President Obama has carried out his threat and picked the most extreme nominee that he was seriously considering!

Over the last couple of weeks, Mr. Obama has stated that he wanted his pick for the highest court in the land to have “empathy” and not be someone who is concerned with “abstract legal theory.” He wanted someone who is “compassionate” in deciding cases, and implied that his pick should not just stick to the rules handed down to us by our Founding Fathers. There’s only one problem: following the U. S. Constitution is what the Supreme Court IS all about!

AND, the White House is already “warning” potential opponents of his nominee to be “careful” in their comments about her!

The real problem that we face is this: what the far left has not been able to pass legislatively — because the American people simply DO NOT support a far-left agenda — they want to impose on the American people through the courts. THAT is why Mr. Obama has nominated Judge Sotomayor: to push the U. S. Supreme Court further and further to the left, to advance that liberal agenda.

As proof, you only have to look at what liberals say about her: Judge Sotomayor is a favorite of far left special interest groups. In addition to her record as a judicial activist, Judge Sotomayor has been recommended for the Supreme Court by none other than Nan Aron of the extremely liberal “Alliance for Justice.” He stated, in a 2004 memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that Judge Sotomayor had “been through an initial vetting and fit into the criteria that WE believe should be the standard for any Supreme Court justice.”

BUT... the “Alliance for Justice” believes that the Supreme Court should be all about legislating from the bench and imposing that far-left agenda on the American people! And THAT is the type of person that Barack Obama has nominated to serve for the rest of her life on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Knowing that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a far-left judicial activist, that she is intellectually unqualified to serve on the Supreme Court, and that people on the left AND on the right feel the same way... how can we possibly let Barack Obama impact the U. S. Supreme Court for decades, in the worst possible way?

The answer is, we CAN’T. So we’ve set up our website to enable you to send “Blast Faxes” to every single U.S. Senator ALL AT ONCE, urging that they REJECT Judge Sotomayor !

For about what it would cost you in time and telephone charges, you can send Blast Faxes to Democrats, Republicans, Independents — EVERYONE in the U.S. Senate, DEMANDING that they STOP this radical judicial activist from ascending to the highest court in the land!
Please, take action right away to STOP this far-left judicial activist from being confirmed to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court!

Sincerely,

So it’s not just a bunch of us “biased right-wingers” who are worried about Judge Sotomayor’s competence to be on the Supreme Court; even experts on the left, including lawyers and fellow judges who worked with her, have expressed serious doubts about her “intellectual capabilities” on matters of law!

Judge Sotomayor readily admits that she applies her feelings and personal politics when deciding cases. In a 2002 speech at Berkeley, she stated that she believes that it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color,” which she believes should “affect our decisions.” She went on to say in that same speech “I would hope 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.”

Just four years ago, when speaking at Duke Law School, Judge Sotomayor “let slip” what is probably the most famous quote of her career: responding to a question on the pros and cons of different types of judicial clerkships, she let her TRUE beliefs slip out: she stated that the appellate court “is where policy is made!” In other words, she made it clear that she believes judges DO MAKE LAW!

And, according the American Bar Association, Judge Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, which bills itself as the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., and is a group that’s promoted driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, amnesty programs, and no immigration law enforcement by local and state police.

Meaning “the Race,” La Raza also has connections to groups that advocate the separation of several southwestern states from the rest of the United States of America.

Gary Kreep, Executive Director
United States Justice Foundation

P.S. As hundreds of thousands of faxes now begin to pour in to the offices on Capitol Hill, USJF is preparing to take additional action, to make sure that your voice is heard.

By the way — don’t be fooled by Barack Obama’s claim that Judge Sotomayor is a “bipartisan pick,” just because President George H.W. Bush appointed her to the federal district court. The first President Bush nominated her in 1991 ONLY because the u.s. senators had forced on White House into a “deal” that enabled former Democrat U. S. Senator Patrick Moynihan to name one of every four federal district-court nominees in New York! In 1998, when President Clinton nominated Sotomayor to the Second Circuit Court of Appeal, 29 Republican Senators voted against her.

Now, we need ALL FORTY Republican Senators voting against her this time — PLUS at least a few Democrats, to prevent her from ascending to the highest court in the land, and imposing her radical judicial activist philosophy on America for the rest of her life!

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