Sotomayor

(NB: This post should have been posted on Tuesday morning. The sites were down for about 30 hours, thanks to Dreamhost, our ISP).

Matt Drudge verbally ejaculated all over his site yesterday with red text and sirens and alerts about how Justice Sonia Sotomayor is screwed, for sure, because the Supreme Court overturned a decision of which she was a part.

Without getting into the merits of the case, the district court – a trial judge – ruled for the defendants on a motion for summary judgment – an accelerated verdict available when the facts are not in dispute. The trial judge wrote a lengthy 48-page decision on the motion.

The plaintiffs appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, and a three-judge panel including Judge Sotomayor affirmed the decision of the trial judge. Much has been made of the fact that their decision was brief. This is not atypical when the court below has already issued a memorandum with its order.

The 2nd Circuit en banc, which would include all 13 judges, voted 7 – 6 to not hear further appeal. The plaintiffs then filed a writ of certiorari, which asks the Supreme Court if it would please hear the case. Remember that the Supreme Court generally picks and chooses the cases it hears. In this case, the SCOTUS heard the case due to a split in the way some circuit courts applied the law, and in its decision yesterday voted 5-4 to overturn the decision of the 2nd Circuit.

First of all, 5-4 is not 9-0.

Secondly, Souter voted to uphold the decision below. Therefore, as far as the results of this case, Sotomayor’s ascension to the SCOTUS makes no difference.

Thirdly, ours is an adversarial court system. Just because one court disagrees with another doesn’t mean the overturned court was completely wrong and should be thrown off the bench. If everything was always an easy decision, easy answer, we’d have no use for trials, courts, or judges.

But the absolute winning commentary comes from this outfit:

Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error.

Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

The firefighters in New Haven who protect the public safety and worked hard for their promotions did not deserve to become victims of racial quotas, and the Supreme Court has now confirmed that they did not deserve to have their claims buried and thrown out by Judge Sotomayor.

Mitch McConnell, looking for attention, commented that the SCOTUS’s long decision was better than Sotomayor’s summary affirmation of the District Court’s 48-page decision & order on Summary Judgment.

But in the end, what’s sad is that people can’t use this bit of news in an intellectually informed or informative way to have a substantive discussion about Sotomayor. Instead, it becomes competing sound bites, our political discourse relegated to reductio ad Twitterum.

In the end, as much as the Republican opposition wishes to make huge piles of hay out of this, it won’t amount to much because Sotomayor’s involvement in this case is hardly the whitey tape they’re trying to make it out to be.