The most wrongheaded, and frequent complaint from the right against Sonia Sotomayor is that she allows her Puerto Rican heritage to guide her jurisprudience. The claim is made based on her 2001 "wise Latina speech", in which she notes that person of color or a woman might bring valuable real world experience to the table in dealing with discrimination cases. Her detractors always ignore her conclusion, in which she asserts that " I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires."
But those who have been most vocal in accusing Sotomayor of ruling out of racial grievance, Pat Buchanan and more politely, Stuart Taylor, find themselves in an awkward position. Buchanan because no one on television more regularly projects a sense of racial grievance, and Taylor because as Scott points out below, Taylor's opposition to judicial activism is entirely confined to government efforts to help minorities. His fealty to "equal protection" under the law for example, melts away when it comes to racial profiling.
Both Taylor and Buchanan are incensed at Sotomayor's decision not to ignore precedent and rule in the plaintiff's favor in a case involving firefighter Frank Ricci. Buchanan has been more inflammatory, but their positions are essentially the same: judicial precedents upholding affirmative action should be ignored if Taylor sees these efforts at hurting white men. It just so happens that both Buchanan and Taylor are white men.
It's difficult to see a more clear cut case of projection: Sotomayor's critics see her as a judicial "activist" who bases her rulings on racial sympathy (a claim contradicted by the facts in her record) but it's not as though they want her to be impartial. Rather, they simply want her to rule in a manner that conforms to their sense of tribal justice, which may be part of why each of them is so threatened by the possibility of a woman of color on the court. It is only because of America's history that such naked tribal sympathies can be hidden behind a veil of neutrality.
-- A. Serwer
