Excerpt of Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’s questioning of then-U.S. District judge Sonia Sotomayor at her 1997 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to the federal appeals court:
Sessions: Judge Sotomayor, would you agree that if we respect that Constitution, we have to enforce it, the good and bad parts?
Sotomayor: Absolutely, sir.
Sessions: Even if we do not agree with part of it?
Sotomayor: Absolutely.
Sessions: And we really undermine and weaken that Constitution when we try to bend it and make it fit our contemporary feelings of the moment?
Sotomayor: Sir, I do not believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.
Sessions: And when we honor it as it is written, I think we strengthen it and make it available to protect us when any great threat to our liberty arises. I agree with you on that.
Source: Judiciary Committee
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May 29, 2009 at 10:33 am |
Of course she still believes it. But the whole exchange is meaningless crap of the first order, so there’s not much to believe. It’s just a nominee saying something completely unfalsifiable that a committee member wants to hear.
May 29, 2009 at 12:57 pm |
You’re giving her more credit than I would. I don’t think that she believes that at all (as evidenced by her subsequent decisions). I think she lied through her teeth about what she “believes,” just to get her nomination out of committee.
May 29, 2009 at 6:46 pm |
that’s a pretty bold accusation jfischer1975. Can you back it up with examples of her efforts to “bend” the constitution?
May 30, 2009 at 1:24 am |
…how about refusing to uphold the Equal Protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment when she didn’t agree with the result? See Ricci v. DeStefano
May 30, 2009 at 12:35 pm |
Do you think Ricci v. DeStefano is an easy call?
From my other writing gig…
“The case, Ricci v. DeStefano, involves firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. They took a civil service test in order to determine who was eligible for promotion, and to rank the promotion candidates. Upon reviewing the exam results, the city discovered that white firefighters did substantially better on the test than African American and Latino firefighters.
The city had the test reviewed by a third-party company, which found that the test questions could have been designed in a way that wouldn’t have resulted in such a big score disparity along racial lines. The city then refused to certify the test results or make promotions based on the test scores. The white firefighters sued, claiming that the city was unlawfully making a race-based decision not to promote them.
At oral arguments before the Supreme Court earlier this month, justices commented on the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ position that New Haven was in. On the one hand, the city’s refusal to certify the test results because white firefighters generally had higher scores could arguably be an illegal race-based decision. On the other hand, if the city certified test scores that resulted from a racially biased exam, the city could open itself up to being sued by the African American and Latino firefighters for race discrimination.”