‘Wise Latina’ Sotomayor Breaks SCOTUS Protocol To Trash Kavanaugh’s Pedigree In Public
Showing why her own colleagues have long viewed her as the abrasive outlier of the High Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor — who said in 2001, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” — recently decided that the hallowed traditions of Supreme Court protocol are secondary to her own progressive “lived experience.”
Speaking at the University of Kansas, the “Wise Latina” took a verbal sledgehammer to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, violating the unwritten rule that judicial disagreements stay within the mahogany walls of One First Street.
Sotomayor’s target was a concurrence Kavanaugh wrote regarding an emergency order on immigration enforcement. While Kavanaugh noted that brief stops for legal residents are typically just that—brief—Sotomayor went for the jugular, and she made it personal. Mocking Kavanaugh’s upbringing, she sneered, “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
It was a stunningly low blow, even for Sotomayor. By attacking Kavanaugh’s class and background rather than his legal reasoning, she didn’t just breach collegiality; she set it on fire. Supreme Court protocol dictates that justices attack the argument, not the man. But for Sotomayor, identity politics is the only North Star, even if it means suggesting a colleague is too “privileged” to understand the plight of the working man.
Of course, this isn’t Sotomayor’s first time playing the role of the “grating” colleague. Her history on the bench is littered with instances where her peers—on both sides of the aisle—have cringed at her antics. Even the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fellow traveler on the Left, was known to trade barbs with Sotomayor in footnotes, frequently questioning her interpretation of the law.
In the Schuette case, Sotomayor’s fifty-eight-page dissent was so vitriolic that Chief Justice John Roberts felt compelled to write a separate concurrence just to call her out for making legal disagreements personal. At the time, even The New York Times admitted her voice was grating on her colleagues. Antonin Scalia was even less diplomatic, famously labeling her comparisons of certain modern policies to Jim Crow as “shameful.”
The Supreme Court relies on “institutional glue”—the handshake, the shared meals, the omertà of the conference room—to function. Sotomayor, however, seems intent on dissolving that glue. While Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently noted that collegiality is an “act of the will,” Sotomayor appears to have willed herself into a state of permanent grievance. By publicly slamming Kavanaugh’s character, she has signaled that she is no longer interested in being a judge among peers, but rather an activist-in-exile, writing children’s books and airing dirty laundry because she can’t win the legal argument.
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