Today in Washington D. C. - July 8, 2009 - John McCain Not Doing Well With His Former "My Friends" the Democrats

The Senate began consideration of the fiscal year 2010 Homeland Security appropriations bill, H.R. 2892. Was to vote on amendments from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to reauthorize the e-Verify program and Jim DeMint (R-SC) to require the completion of at least 700 miles of border fencing by the end of 2010. Yesterday, the Senate voted 47-51 against an amendment from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)to eliminate a grant program and reduce funds for state and local FEMA programs. Note: Sen. John McCain is not doing so well with his old "my friends"the Democrat senators who again reject another of his amendments.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor: As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to begin hearings on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court next week, Senate Republicans are concerned about whether she will use her policy preferences to make law from the bench.

When Judge Sotomayor’s name was being considered for a nomination to the high court, one of the first things Americans learned about her was from a video of an appearance she made at Duke University in 2005, where she said that “court of appeals is where policy is made.” Given that a Supreme Court Justice is in a role higher than that of an appeals court judge, there is some concern that she might take this view to the high court, especially in light of her ruling in the now-famous Ricci case.

It’s now known that while Sotomayor was an adviser to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the group (per the AP) “brought several discrimination lawsuits that sought to scrap the results of job tests because too few Hispanics scored well.” The Wall Street Journal noted, “The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund filed several lawsuits on behalf of minority employees alleging that promotional examinations were racially biased, obtaining judgments or settlements that guaranteed their promotion, sometimes ahead of white employees with higher scores.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell explained the problem in a floor speech yesterday: “As has been reported, before she was on the bench, Judge Sotomayor was in leadership positions with PRLDEF for over a decade. While there, she monitored the group’s lawsuits and was described as an ‘ardent supporter’ of its litigation projects—one of the most important of which was a plan to sue cities based on their use of civil service exams. In fact, she has been credited with helping develop the group’s policy of challenging these types of standardized tests." When the Ricci case reached Judge Sotomayor on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, “[s]he ruled that the government can intentionally discriminate against one group on the basis of race if it dislikes the outcome of a race-neutral exam and claims that another group may sue it. . . . [A]s Judge Cabranes put it, under her approach, employers can ‘reject the results of an employment examination whenever those results failed to yield a desired racial outcome, i.e., failed to satisfy a racial quota.’” Note: when the Supreme Court overturned Sotomayor’s ruling in its review of the Ricci case, “No one on the Supreme Court, not even the dissenters, thought [hers] was a correct reading of the law.”
The New York Times writes today that next week, “Republicans say they intend to focus on what they see as Judge Sotomayor’s willingness to bring a personal agenda to the court, especially when it comes to issues of race.” A GOP aide has advised that Republicans will “Respectfully ask questions but very pointedly ask about the appearance of favoritism. Americans don’t like the idea that a judge might play favorites.”

Sen. McConnell summarized the problem: “In the Ricci case — her third and final reversal of this term — Judge Sotomayor was so wrong in interpreting the law that all nine justices, of all ideological stripes, disagreed with her. As we consider her nomination to the Supreme Court, my colleagues should ask themselves this important question: is she allowing her personal or political agenda to cloud her judgment and favor one group of individuals over another, irrespective of what the law says?”

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