SCOTUS Rejects Sotomayor’s “Because I Said So” Decision
SCOTUS decided one of the big cases of the year today, Ricci v DiStefano, and there weren’t any major surprises. You can find a couple pretty good analyzes from Ed Morrissey and a roundup at Instapundit.
The meat of the SCOTUS decision is that the city of New Haven was wrong to deny the promotions because it believed it could be sued. Instead, it should have considered whether the suits its decision might have promoted were likely to win. That seems a fair resolution to the matter, insofar as it reduces the chance that a frivolous lawsuit could be effectively used as a weapon, but it puts employers like the city in a tougher position. Now, instead of deciding that any potential lawsuit is enough to reason to discriminate against white males, an employer like the city of New Haven will have to use its best judgment to decide whether a potential lawsuit has a reasonable chance of winning. As William Jacobsen notes, the decision was based on New Haven’s focus on race and the “disparate impact” portion of the law. Because the court found that New Haven violated the law, the decision stopped short of addressing the potential equal protection and 14th Amendment concerns.
The other reason this decision was important is that the case was brought to SCOTUS from Judge Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals. That court decided against the firefighters in a surprisingly curt one paragraph decision that almost had to be wrung out of the judges. Republicans and other critics of Judge Sotomayor would be wise to concentrate less on the outcome of the SCOTUS case and more on the fact that SCOTUS turned her one paragraph hand-wave into a nearly 100-page decision. Even the minority decision weighed in at over 30 pages.
I think this shows that Judge Sotomayor is either a judicial lightweight, not ready for the heady intellectual work that being a SCOTUS Justice requires, or that she was so entrenched in her own ideology that she thought a “shut up; that’s why!” decision was all the firefighters merited. In either case, Republicans could make the case that Sotomayor is far too ideologically rigid and not intellectually curious enough to be one of the nine elite judges in the country.
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Category: Law and Order
So Jimmie, do you believe that the Appeals level of the federal court system is superior to the Supreme Court? She showed judicial restraint in kicking it up to the Supremes with little comment, except to express sympathy for the plaintiffs. But you seem to be arguing that these decisions should be made at the appellate level rather than at the Supreme Court. And if you really do believe the appellate level is the supreme level of the federal judicial system, then isn't putting her on the Supreme Court a demotion?
Actually, she didn't kick it up to the Supremes. She dismissed the appeal out of hand, with no apparent thought involved.
The rest of your logic makes no sense.