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Washington
Post: "Judge's votes
shows no single political ideology."
The Post clearly needs glasses.
Washington
Post writer Jerry Markon, who apparently can't tell the difference
between judicial liberalism and corn flakes, argued in a Sunday, June
7 Post A4 article that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is
somehow politically impartial because she ruled against a Protestant minister
who sued his church for age discrimination when they forced him to retireand
accused her Republican colleagues of judicial activism when they allowed
his case to go ahead, and then in a subsequent case, when she ruled that
African-American and Latino prison inmates had the right to vote from
their prison cells despite laws in almost every State in the Union that
strip convicts of the right to vote.
Markon argued that
these two cases and six others reflect Sotomayor's complex approach
to discrimination. In his mind, these cases refute the conservative pigeonholing
of Sotomayor as an anti-white racist simply because in some of
the cases Sotomayor supported plaintiffs alleging discrimination,
and in other cases she supported the defendant's who allegedly perpetuated
racism. Markon failed to examine the substance of the cases, because
in every case, Sotomayor's opinion dovetailed with the views of
the far left. Among the eight cases were these decisions:
In 1999, in Gant
v Wallingford the Gant family moved from Meriden to Wallingford,
Connecticut during the winter of 1993 and enrolled their 6-year old
son, Ray Gant, Jr. in the first grade at Cook Hill Elementary.
Gant was the only African-American student in the class. Within
3 days of Ray, Jr.'s arrival, his first grade teacher, defendant-appellee
Grace Candido, informed Elisa Gant that her son could
not do the work in the first grade and that he should be transferred
back to kindergarten. The decision to demote Ray had been approved
by the school principle, defendant-appellee Patricia Cronin.
In their lawsuit, the Gants argued that their son was subject
to racial slurs from white students, and that their son was demoted
without their consent.
The US District Court dismissed
the Gant's case pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P.12(b)(6) for failing
to state a claim upon which relief could be sought. The Gants
alleged racial discrimination without any evidence that discrimination
had taken place. On appeal to the 2nd Circuit, Judge Sotomayor argued
that the treatment received by the lone black student in his brief stint
at Cook Hill Elementary was unprecedented and contrary to the school's
policy. And, even though all available evidence indicated that Ray
Gant's demotion to kindergarten was appropriate, Sotomayor
believed the demotion was racially motivated. The decision of the District
Court was vacated and the case was remanded back to the original court
for further proceedings.
In a 2006 case,
Joseph Hayden, a former inmate and the Campaign Director of an
advocacy group called Unlock The Block, filed suit against the
State of New York alleging discrimination against African-Americans
and arguing that a New York law prohibiting those convicted of crimes
and who were either in prison or on parole from voting violated Section
2 of the Voting Rights Act, in addition to violating the 1st,
14th and 15th Amendments.
The US District Court
for the Southern District of New York dismissed the lawsuit of those
who actually wanted the right to vote from within prison. The dismissal
was upheld by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals with Sotomayor
dissenting, saying that the Voting Rights Act covered felon disenfranchisement.
In her dissent, Sotomayor said: "It's plain to anyone
reading the Voting Rights Act that it applies to all 'voting qualifications...Section
2 of the Act by its unambiguous terms subjects felony disenfranchisement
and all other voting qualifications to its coverage."
In the case 2001
case of Galarza v Keans, Edwin Galarza was tried before
a jury in New York state court on narcotics charges. During jury selection
on Valentine's Day, 1989 the prosecutor used her preemptory challenges
to strike 11 Hispanics from the jury that would hear the case against
Galarza. Galarza's lawyer argued before the judge that
the prosecutor systematically challenged every black or Hispanic juror
to make sure there were no minority jury members. The court questioned
the prosecutor at length for her reasons for excusing potential jurors
who were Hispanic, and found no prejudice in her logic. Galarza
was found guilty of numerous narcotics charges on May 24, 1989.
Galarza appealed
his conviction, claiming inter alia, that he was denied equal
protection of the law because the prosecutor used her preemptory challenges
in a racially discriminatory manner. Before the case reached the 2nd
Circuit Court of Appeals, four other courts2 State and 2 federalrejected
Galarza's discrimination claim. The three judge panel in the
2nd Circuit consisted of two Democrats and one Republican. And even
though all of the evidence, and all of the trial transcripts prove that
Galarza's conviction was not tainted by any racial bias as the result
of the prosecutor's discriminatory use of preemptory strikes, the Democrats
ruled that the prosecutor's "race-neutral" explanation for
using her preemptory challenges to exclude minorities tainted the jury.
The sentence was vacated and the case remanded back to the State court
for a new trial.
All of the cases sited by
Post writer Markon, Sotomayor sided with the extremist
views of the left. At first glance in one of those cases, Pappas v
Giuliani, Markon would have us think Sotomayor sided
with racists against African Americans and Jews to protect the 1st Amendmentsomething,
one might think, a conservative would do. However, hate speech is not,
nor ever has been construed to be free speech, just as pornographic material,
particularly when it is made available to children, is not free speech.
In the 2002 case
of Pappas v Giuliani. Thomas Pappas was a New York City
police department MIS employee. He was a 17-year veteran of the NYPD.
At the time of his firing, Pappas worked in the NYPD's Management
Information Systems Division. On at least two occasions in 1996
and 1997, Pappas received contribution requests from the Mineola
Auxiliary Police Department (where he resided, or at least received
his mail). Included with the solicitation request was a reply envelop.
Pappas stuffed the envelopes with offensive racial rhetoric conveyed
in anti-black and anti-semitic messages. He mailed them anonymously.
The Nassau County Police Dept. launched an investigation to find the
sender. After drawing a blank, they sent out another mailing with coded
envelopes. This time they were able to trace the envelop to Pappas'
PO Box 321 in Mineola, NY.
The PO Box was used by
The Populist Party in the name of Thomas Pappas. On March 24,
1998 Pappas was interrogated by a NYPD Internal Affairs officer.
Ultimately, Pappas confessed to sending the hate mail to Police
Auxiliary because they were soliciting his organization for money. The
Internal Affairs Division of the NYPD recommended Pappas' termination,
and he was fired.
Pappas sued the City
of New York for firing him, claiming the materials he sent out were not
mailed in his capacity as an employee of the NYPD, but in his capacity
of a private citizen from his home, and as the head of his own political
advocacy group. The NYPD charged Pappas with a violation of departmental
regulation. Pappas said he was fed up with getting donation requests
from auxiliary police organizations and sent the inflammatory material
in protest. He was terminated. Clearly, had he not included the inflammatory
material in the replies to the auxiliary police organizations, he would
still be employed, so it's a reasonable stretch to say that he was fired
for poor judgment in the way exercised his free speech rights.
The 2nd Circuit upheld his
firing in a 2-to-1 decision, with Sotomayor dissenting. In her
minority opinion, Sotomayor noted that Pappas had mailed
out fliers that ridiculed black and Jewish people. His lawsuit was dismissed
by a lower court. The decision was upheld by the 2nd Circuit which ruled
that the city had the right to terminate him because he disseminated bigoted
diatribes. Sotomayor argued that Pappas' rights had been
violated. Sotomayor said: "I find the speech in this case
patently offensive, hateful, and insulting. The Court should not, however,
gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First
Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it
does not like."
The appeal to the 2nd Circuit
raised the question of whether the municipal government violated Pappas'
1st Amendment rights by firing him for distributing racist material. The
court concluded that a racist diatribe did not constitute free speech
and held the City of New York was within its rights to terminate him.
The court further ruled that while there are few rights more closely guarded
than the right of free speech, the court held that this right is not absolute
when it conflicts with the effective function of governmentin this
case, the trust the citizens must have in their law enforcement agencies,
and the need in our society that police are obligated to enforce the law
fairly and without bias.
In Sotomayor's view,
because Pappas was not a high-ranking official in the NYPD, he
did not make policy. Furthermore, since Pappas was a computer geek
and not a police officer, his biases would not impair the trust the public
must have in the peace officers to feel safe and secure in the community.
Sotomayor felt that the City should not have been allowed to discharge
Pappas since, absent the City telling the media that a police department
employee distributed the offensive material, no one outside the department
would have ever known, and the city could have easily swept the whole
matter under the rug. (Her opinion.)
When Sotomayor was
involved in the panel discussion at Duke University in 2005 where she
made her most famous faux pas, saying that it is at the Court of
Appeals level where policy (law) is made, she went on to explain that
at the District Court level "...you look at the application of the
law because facts control the decisions. On the Court of Appeals, you
are looking to how the law is developing so that it will then be applied
to a broad class of cases. You are always thinking about the ramifications
of this ruling on the next step in the development of the law." Which
is what Sotomayor was doing in Pappas v Giuliani. She was
practicing judicial activism. As offensive as Pappas' brochures
were, it was important to leave that door ajar so that racist speech could
be protected just down the road and around the corner where there was
a whole new cast of racist characters which society would soon be condemning.
And, the Constitution needed to clearly define the right of the American
people to condemn this sect of bigots in the harshest terms. Who are these
racists? Christians, of course.
In all of the instances drawn
on by Washington Post reporter Jerry Markon in his June
7 article suggesting that Judge Sotomayor was not tied to a particular
ideology, she is marching lockstep to the globalist beat of the Fascist-Marxist
Obama Drum Corp. She is a Marxist judicial activist with a liberal
strip as wide as all eight lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue leading from Congress
to the White House, and from the Oval Office to the Supreme Court on First
Street, NE.
When it comes to spin,
only the New York Times spins a better fable than the Washington
Post. But, then they are even farther to the left, and they've been
doing it a lot longer. So, once again, for whatever it's worth, you have
my two cents on this matter.
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