Category Archives: Affirmative Action

Update VI: Sonia A-Shout-Out-To-My-Mom Mayor

Affirmative Action, Constitution, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, The Courts

FIDELITY TO THE LAW. As you read through Sonia Sotomayor’s brief remarks delivered at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, consider first that Sotomayor swore “fidelity” to the law, not to the Constitution. Second, her alleged loyalty to the law should not assuage you, since this statement begs the question; it assumes that post-Constitution America holds an immutable notion of what the law is. Not so. (The law to Obama liberals, for example, must entail an admixture of empathy and life experience.)

But how unlike Sotomoayor is this writer. I’ve opened this post with a comment on logic and the law. Sotomayor began and continued her statement by extending the love, the gratitude, the humility to … blah blah… “who made this day possible.” Sonia gave a shout out to mom, bro, barack.

Her initial greetings and props are uncanny in their mundane, anti-intellectual, Oprah-worthy nature. I can just hear the mentors of Sotomayor—the people responsible for the bumper crops of mindless monolithic graduates emerging from US institutions—instructing her throughout the years: “be sure to emphasize your community service, the strong black or Hispanic women in your life, the diversity of your complexion and your career.”

The law according to our Latina: “my judicial philosophy … is simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make the law — it is to apply the law. And it is clear, I believe, that my record in two courts reflects my rigorous commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its terms; interpreting statutes according to their terms and Congress’ intent; and hewing faithfully to precedents established by the Supreme Court and my Circuit Court.”

Much is made of hewing to precedent. George Bush “thought” that a judicial activist was someone who disobeys the President. Left-liberals believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent, unless the precedent was established by an originalist Court.

Right thinking individuals know that striking down unconstitutional laws is not judicial activism. Judicial activism means 1) minting new rights not in the Constitution 2) striking down laws to comport with these freshly minted unconstitutional rights.

Update I (July 14): PULLING A JOE THE PLUMBER ON FRANK RICCI. The firefighter from New Haven, whose Constitutional case Sotomayor dismissed in a hastily scribbled paragraph, is being smeared by the likes of Dahlia Lithwick of Slate magazine. Watch and listen as Fox News’ Megyn Kelly interviews Ricci’s attorney, and asks: “Does this remind you at all of what happened to Joe the Plumber?” Ricci will be witness for the Minority at the hearings.

Update II: Sen. Grassley grills the woman—who is manifestly working with half the brainpower of a Justice Roberts—about property rights and unlawful “takings.” Her responses are poor.
The Volokh Conspiracy: “During the confirmation hearings today, Judge Sotomayor considerably misstated of the holding of Kelo v. City of New London, making the decision seem more limited than it actually was. In response to questioning by Democratic Senator Herb Kohl, Sotomayor refused to reveal her view of Kelo, a standard tactic used by previous Supreme Court nominees, but also incorrectly claimed that Kelo upheld a taking in an ‘economically blighted area.'”

I’m disgusted at the absence of a transcript to refer to. What impoverished reporting from the mainstream media. Can’t they get a court stenographer to offer a contemporaneous transcript?

During the tremendously important session on Kelo, an anti-abortion dunderhead began screaming. Here I am straining to hear how the woman excused her troubling ruling in Didden v. Village of Port Chester, when one of those abortion idiots disrupts a most crucial moment in the hearing: a discussion of government’s violation of property rights. But then what would a zealot like that know about property rights!? This sort of “Christian” is forever demonstrating for the glory of aborting full-terms people abroad and protecting fetuses not HIS stateside.

Update III: SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER is showcasing the wonders of his nominee by walking her through decisions that prove her fidelity to the rule of law and not to feelings. At one point Sotomayor says she’s entrusted with doing what’s in the common good, which she equates with following the law. I thought that following the law was supposed to provide justice and a remedy for individuals or other entities wronged. The common good?

Update IV: So Republican Lindsey Graham of the interminable war on terror, amnesty for illegals and many other Republican initiatives, can be bright when he chooses to. He has been asking poignant questions on judicial philosophy: originalism vs. living-document doctrine; is there a right in the Constitution that provides for abortion, etc. In the last probe, Sotomayour was permitted to fudge the question. Naturally, the Constitution provides for no right to abortion. If abortion is to be regulated, it must be at the state level.

I spoke to soon; Graham has gone back to his area of moral comfort: the amorphous, ever-morphing war on terror.

So far, Sen. Charles Grassley gets my vote for canniest politician. He asked good questions on property rights.

Update V: Let’s get back to that part of the hearings. If I understood Sotomayor’s testimony on the Didden Case, “where her Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that it was constitutionally permissible for a state to condemn property because the owners had refused developer Greg Wasser’s demand to pay him $800,000 or give him a 50% stake in their business, threatening to have the property condemned if they did not comply (via The Volokh Conspiracy)—then her decision against private property rights turned on a technicality.

Update VI (July 15): Judge Sotomayor and two other 2nd Circuit judges tried to bury their hastily written summary orders, “which represent the unanimous judgment of three appellate judges,” in the “discrimination suit by a group of [white] firefighters against New Haven, Conn.” As Stuart Taylor Jr. of National Journal tells it, this sneaky act might have prevented the case from coming before the SCOTUS. Fortunately, Judge Cabranes, “a Clinton appointee of Puerto Rican heritage — and once a mentor to [Sotomayor] — … published a blistering June 12, 2008, dissent,” thus bringing “the case forcefully to the attention of the Supreme Court.”

Read on.

Updated: Barack Wants More History From Below

Affirmative Action, Africa, America, Barack Obama, History, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism

For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons have been expiating at every opportunity. But as historian Jeremy Black points out in The Slave Trade, Europeans also brought about the demise of this despicable practice in Africa.
Having made the obligatory pilgrimage to Ghana, Barack told Anderson Cooper—the “journalist” noted for introducing the country to the practice of tea bagging—that “slavery is a terrible part of the United States’ history and should be taught in a way that connects that past cruelty to current events, such as the genocide in Darfur.”

What a change that makes, doesn’t it?

Does our overlord seek to repetitively rub in the never-changing theme of the white man’s burden, the theme WASPs welcome like wimps? Or is he open to teaching Americans about the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert? Or across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. How about the vibrant, indigenous slave trade conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa?

I suggest that Africa’s own Little Lord Fauntleroy read the words of a brother who’s seldom seen on the idiot’s lantern, and whose works are not distributed widely across the racial tyranny that is America: Keith B. Richburg.

Wrote Richburg in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa:

“I feel for [Africa’s] suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.”

Repeat after Richburg, Mr. president.

Update (July 14): Myron, I had objected to the use of “slavery” with reference to the West. Alistair addressed the so-called plight of women in the West. The Third World is a different matter (or is it what remains of the Second World that you decried?). There, statutes may declare slavery illegal, but tradition sees nothing wrong with forms of it. Guess what wins out?

Sonia Sotomayor Versed In Classics … Kiddie Classics

Affirmative Action, Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Law, The Courts

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SotoSetAsides Mayor, whose confirmation hearing starts on Monday—and who’ll be confirmed—is bound to be a judicial wrecking ball. Or, she may prove to be just the dim liberal bulb the doctor ordered.

In case you’re still looking to the Republicans to make a principled stand on anything, CNN reports that they “have promised a fair but thorough hearing … [only] A few have said they intend to vote against her nomination when it reaches the full Senate.”

As always, national treasure Pat Buchanan puts things into perspective by exposing the fraudulent “Ivy-League” institutions that have disgorged Soto So-and-So:

“By her own admission, Sonia Sotomayor is an ‘affirmative action baby.’

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance – No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review – her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘The Troll Under the Bridge’?

In video clips dating back 25 years, and now provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor, according to the Times, even calls herself an ‘affirmative action product.'”

Update II: The Din For Democracy

Affirmative Action, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, South-Africa

After visiting South Africa, Eli Kedourie, “noted student of nationalism,” wrote in the South Africa International:

“If majority and minority are perpetual, then government ceases to have a mediatory or remedial function, and becomes an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by the majority. … The worst effects of the tyranny of the majority are seen when parliamentary government on the unalloyed Westminster model is introduced into countries divided by religion or language or race. Such for example was the case of Iraq … where an extremely heterogeneous society came to be endowed with constitutions which made no provision for diversity, and where the result was tyranny of one groups over the other groups in the society.”

Kedourie was not the only sensible scholar who pointed out the obvious. But that’s history—South Africa is history.

Why are such voices not heeded today? America’s make-up is changing. Through mass immigration, it too is moving toward becoming a racially and ethnically stratified country, in which democracy will be ever ruthlessly wielded as a weapon of the usurping majority. Yet the din for democracy grows among the conservative and neoconservative cadre.

From “Exporting Democracy”:

Political democracy on the other hand, is a “leftist” idea. Why? Because it inevitably leads to a massive consolidation of power, centralized especially in the national government.

Democracy, like leftism, is un-American. It is, in fact, a foreign pollutant that wafted over the Atlantic from the French Revolution. And like a wild weed, it took root in the republic’s soil, growing out of control.

Update I (July 2): The post addresses a specific aspect that makes democratic mass-society unworkable. The premise of Mr. Kraus, hereunder, is that all cultures are equally prone to the principles of the Enlightenment. Nothing a little show of Western pride won’t fix. I vehemently disagree. The historical population of America is becoming progressively more ignorant of the principles of freedom by the day. But dissolving the American people and electing another—which is what America’s centrally planned immigration policy aims at—will ensure freedom is never revived, as immigration policies privilege Third World immigrants. Please refer to my immigration archive. Democracy, for what it’s worth, works in small, relatively homogeneous societies, like Denmark (although that country too is becoming too riven by religious and racial strife to work).

Update II: Mr. Kraus, there is nothing “unorganized” about the “multicultural noise machine.” Identity politics is highly organized and emasculating. If the latest affirmative action case tells you anything it is that by nature, the Anglo-American WASP tends to go quietly into that good night. He is expected to so do. (In fact, others of their ilk on this blog have reprimanded Ricci for daring to seek redress, instead of doing what WASPS do; hunker down and get used to losing.)
Empires have been decimated by the barbarians from within and without. You can’t do much about your own barbarians, except try and educate them. But why import more?