Monday, June 25, 2012

Lamar Smith: Obama's amnesty for illegal immigrants is against the law

Lamar Smith: Obama's amnesty for illegal immigrants is against the law

BUT LAWS DON'T APPLY TO OBAMA OR TO ILLEGALS!

HOW MANY STATES ARE BECOMING LIKE MEXIFORNIA WHERE THE LAWS ARE TRAPPLED ON BY ILLEGALS WITH IMPUNITY?





Obama soft on illegals enforcement


 Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.

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Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article) 

Article Link:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045

OBAMA AND THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA





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LA RAZA SUPREMACIST SONIA SOTOMAYER SHOULD NOT BE VOTING ON MATTERS PERTAINING TO THE MEXICAN INVASION - OBAMA'S "WISE LATINA"


VOTERS). SOTOMAYER VOTED AGAINST MAKING E-VERIFY MANDATORY NATION WIDE!

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The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender

28 May 2009

The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.

As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.

No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind.

There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.

Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.

Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.

The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.

Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.

The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.

Patrick Martin

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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”

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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

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OBAMA SELECTED LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS TO ADVANCE THE OBAMA AGENDA OF KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED, AND BUY THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES BY MAKING SURE ILLEGALS GET OUR JOBS! THE EASIEST WAY TO DO THIS IS TO SABOTAGE LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS. OBAMA, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, THE OBAMA DEPT. of LA RAZA JUSTICE, AND THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE SABOTAGING E-VERIFY ALL OVER THE NATION!

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Friday, June 5, 2009

Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor faces new questions about her views on group and identity politics... after it became clear she has a long history of making race-and-gender based remarks. We’ll have a special report. Sotomayor’s views on our Second Amendment rights are the
subject of our face off debate tonight.



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From the Desk of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton:


Sotomayor Evasive, Disingenuous During Confirmation Hearings

The eagerly anticipated confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor got underway this week. And how did she do?

Let’s start with Sotomayor’s rambling and constantly shifting explanation for one of her most controversial statements – that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” This racist remark was made during a speech Sotomayor delivered to students at Cal Berkeley in 2001. The reason it is getting so much attention is that it calls into question Judge Sotomayor’s impartiality – and she made the remark repeatedly through the years. (Judicial Watch addressed this comment and many other troublesome statements and activities by Sotomayor in a letter to Senators Patrick Leahy, D-VT, and Jeff Sessions, R-AL, last week. You can read it by clicking here.)

During the hearing, at first, Sotomayor dismissed the statement as a “rhetorical flourish” that “fell flat.” However, under subsequent questioning Sotomayor attempted to defend her remarks, indicating that it was an attempt to “inspire” her audience. Of course Sotomayor quickly added that the comment has nothing to do with her attitude towards dispensing justice, which she claims is firmly rooted in the rule of law. (Action by the Supreme Court might argue this point, given that the High Court just overturned the decision she helped make in the Ricci racial discrimination matter. Click here for more.)

Sotomayor also tried to justify the comment by comparing it to allegedly similar ones made by Justice Alito and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. And in another explanation she said her words shouldn’t be taken literally.

“I think she just made it more muddled,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In sum, Judge Sotomayor tried to deny the plain meaning of her “wise Latina” statements. This disingenuous approach may pass muster in Washington, but most people would be troubled by her lawyerly evasions.

Can you recall a Supreme Court nominee in recent years that has had to spend so much time defending their impartiality as a judge? I can’t.

On the issue of abortion Sotomayor said that she feels Roe v Wade is “settled law.” According to The Associated Press: “Supreme Court aspirant Sonia Sotomayor said Tuesday that she considers the question of abortion rights is settled precedent and says there is a constitutional right to privacy...Answering a question later from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sotomayor said that “all precedents of the Supreme Court I consider settled law…” This doesn’t mean much, as the Supreme Court regularly overturns its precedents.

Judge Sotomayor said she had no idea why one of her former colleagues at the New York law firm Pavia & Harcourt would say, "I can guarantee she'll be for abortion rights." Maybe he knew of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s radical pro-abortion agenda when she helped run the organization? But Judge Sotomayor professed to have no clue about the legal positions of her former group, despite the fact that she set the group’s litigation agenda.

Senator Lindsey Graham also initiated a tough, dramatic line of questioning with respect to Sotomayor’s temperament. In fact, Senator Graham flat out asked her: “Do you have a temperament problem?” (Sotomayor has been described as a “bully” on the bench.) Sotomayor attempted to defend herself against the charge but the issue was still left hanging in the hearing room.

Sotomayor’s problem for this hearing was a big one. She has had to defend the indefensible. She did this by reversing course, professing fidelity to the law, disavowing her radical judicial philosophy as described in her many speeches and writings, and by misleading the committee on one some of her more controversial decisions.

The judge went so far as to disavow President Obama’s lawless “empathy” standard for picking judges. Judge Sotomayor said that she would apply the law to the facts. She said, “Judges can’t rely on what is in their heart.”

In the end, she sounded like the most conservative nominee to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president in thirty years. (It is interesting that, even in the age of Obama, liberal jurists must pretend to be conservatives to gain Senate approval. It confirms the victory of conservatives in framing the public policy debate over liberal judicial activism. Even Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court must pretend to reject judicial activism.)

There is no question, given all of her “wise Latina” and other radical statements and her long-term connection to groups such as the far-left Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, that Judge Sotomayor is the wrong judge for a seat on the Supreme Court. I don’t believe her confirmation conversion to “fidelity to the law.”

Unfortunately, Republicans seem resigned to the fact that Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed with little debate, but it’s not too late to change the situation. You must make your voices heard! Even liberal Senator Feinstein (D-CA) admitted this week that she had received calls of concern on the Sotomayor nomination. These calls matter. Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard today at 202-224-3121, and let your senators know your thoughts.

Some in the press have characterized the Sotomayor hearings as “grueling.” I attended them for a bit and I found them interesting – in how a nominee can evade questions, deny her record, and largely control the room in the face of questioning by hapless senators. A well-prepared lawyer like Judge Sotomayor can do these types of hearings in their sleep.

There have been some tough questions for sure, but without an underlying commitment to carefully making the case against this nomination too many of the questions amounted to nothing more than “rhetorical flourishes” that “fall flat.” As a result, Americans may end up with a biased, activist justice on the Supreme Court.

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VIVA LA RAZA?



Sonia Sotomayor opposes E-Verify requirement

True to form, she said it was illegal to make employers e-verify citizen status of new hires.

Interesting, she says a state cannot force employers to check if employees they are hiring are illegal. Thankfully the court ruled 5-3 supporting law. But now we know for sure just how extreme far left Obama's choice was. We cannot afford Obama to get another term, or you can bet this country will be overrun by illegals. I don't want this country to be poor and corrupt like Mexico, which it will if illegals overrun the country.

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Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law

The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano.  (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief).  Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed.  From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.

To date, Arizona’s E-Verify law has been upheld by all lower courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit, in particular, viewed it as an exercise of a state’s traditional power to regulate businesses.  (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2010).  Obama’s Justice Department, however, disagrees. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said in his filing with the Supreme Court that the lower courts were wrong to uphold the statute because federal immigration law expressly preempts any state law imposing sanctions on employers hiring illegal immigrants.  Mr. Katyal argues that this is not a licensing law, but “a statute that prohibits the hiring of unauthorized aliens and uses suspension and revocation of all state-issued licenses as its ultimate sanction.”  (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief, p. 10).  This is the administration’s first court challenge to a state’s authority to act against illegal immigration, and could be a preview of the battle brewing over Arizona’s recent illegal immigration crackdown through SB 1070. 

Napolitano has made no comment on the Department of Justice’s decision to challenge the 2007 law, but federal officials said that she has taken an active part in the debate over whether to do so. (Politico, May 28, 2010).   As Governor of Arizona, Napolitano said she believed the state law was valid and became a defendant in the many lawsuits against it. (Id.).



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Sotomayor’s record: A judicial pragmatist and defender of corporate interests

By Don Knowland
17 July 2009

As a nominee to the US Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor is reliable defender of corporate interests, siding with big business, government authority and the police far more than with the poor, the arrested or the oppressed. With 17 years on the federal courts, the most of any Supreme Court nominee in more than half a century, she is anything but an unknown quantity.

In her five years as a federal district court trial judge, Sotomayor issued hundreds of written decisions. In 12 years on the appellate court, she has been the principal author of over 150 opinions. She joined in the majority opinion in over 350 cases.

A survey of her written decisions reveals a jurist firmly wedded to the bourgeois mainstream, particularly when business interests are at stake, and not given to sweeping formulations. The New York Times legal correspondent assigned to cover the Supreme Court wrote that Sotomayor’s opinions “reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language.”

A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Sotomayor’s rulings could not be easily categorized in ideological terms, and “showed an adherence to precedent, an emphasis on the facts of a case, and an avoidance of overstepping the court’s judicial role.”

According to one of Sotomayor’s former law clerks, “She is a rule-bound pragmatist-very geared toward determining what the right answer is and what the law dictates...” Sotomayor herself has professed to follow a narrow “just the facts” approach to judicial decision-making, a style described by some as judicial minimalism.

However, when important issues arise that affect more fundamental interests of the ruling elite, such as national security matters or big economic questions, Sotomayor comes down invariably on the side of the establishment, at the expense of the majority of society.

A law-and-order judge

As with most former prosecutors, Sotomayor has a negative if not hostile view of the rights of those accused of crimes. Encomiums from her former associates at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and various New York and national police organizations were read into the record of her confirmation hearing.

According to Leroy Frazer Jr., first assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former colleague of Sotomayor, she “has contributed greatly to law enforcement in New York” as a judge. John Siffert, an attorney who taught appellate advocacy with Sotomayor at New York University School of Law for ten years, confirms that she is loath to overturn criminal convictions. “She was not viewed as a pro-defense judge” while she sat as a trial judge, Siffert told the press.

One decision Sotomayor authored as an appellate judge upheld the use of evidence police seized mistakenly, thinking they had a warrant. The Supreme Court’s five-justice conservative bloc came to the same conclusion this year, over the dissent of the court’s four moderate justices. Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who was on the losing side of the January Supreme Court decision, said Judge Sotomayor’s ruling displayed her “willingness to give police the benefit of the doubt.”

One case decided by Sotomayor as an appellate judge involved the timeliness of the habeas corpus petition filed by a prisoner convicted of murder and rape. Congress had only recently passed President Bill Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism-Effective Death Penalty Act, which imposed a one-year time limit on such petitions. Confusion existed in the federal courts regarding how the new law would be applied to pending cases. Following the advice of a court clerk, the defendant’s attorney mailed in rather than filed the appeal the day it was due.

Sotomayor and her colleagues on the case refused to consider the petition, ruling that it was untimely and that its lateness was not excusable. They also summarily brushed off the defendant’s claim to innocence, even though guilt was based on a confession the police coerced when the defendant was 17. The defendant then spent six more years in jail before DNA testing conclusively established his innocence.

Capital and labor

While frequently dissenting against reactionary rulings on issues involving democratic rights, the four-justice moderate bloc on the Supreme Court has increasingly tended to join the court’s right wing in favoring big business over workers and consumers where their economic interests are explicitly counterposed, as in cases involving punitive damage awards against giant corporations.

Sotomayor is unlikely to buck that trend. She currently sits in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears the most important appeals affecting Wall Street and the financial industry. That court’s 2006 decision strongly favored Wall Street in a group of cases involving thousands of investors suing dozens of the largest banks and investment houses, including Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and the now defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The plaintiffs charged massive fraud involving manipulation of the market for initial public offerings of company shares. Such schemes played a major role in inflating the dot.com and telecom bubbles.

As a practical matter, the plaintiffs in the case could proceed only if they could band together for class actions. The appellate ruling dismissed the cases on the basis that questions as to what information and assurances individual plaintiffs relied on in purchasing shares precluded finding sufficient commonality to permit the cases to proceed on a class action basis. This amounted to an extremely strained reading of the rules regarding class action suits and reduced the value of the plaintiffs’ recovery by many billions of dollars.

Sotomayor’s most well known decision as a district court judge involved her issuing an injunction in 1995 against baseball team owners during the longest strike in baseball history, which followed an owner lock-out of players. Sotomayor ruled that the National Relations Labor Board had cause to believe that baseball owners committed unfair labor practices by eliminating free agency and salary arbitration provisions of the expired collective bargaining agreement. She ordered the owners to bargain in good faith on those issues. The strike then ended.

As an appellate judge, Sotomayor has favored working class plaintiffs mainly in disability cases. In one case, Sotomayor ruled that New York did not sufficiently accommodate a dyslexic applicant taking the bar examination.

Sotomayor dissented in a 2003 case brought by the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission against a major trucking company relating to discrimination against drivers who took medication that the company believed impaired driving. Federal regulations provide that discrimination occurs if a company perceives that a worker or workers have an impairment as to a “class of jobs” compared to average persons of comparable skill, as opposed to single jobs. The majority dismissed the case, saying that the evidence showed only that the employer perceived the drivers as incapable of long-distance, stressful driving jobs. Sotomayor argued that there was sufficient evidence that the employer perceived the impairment to extend to any truck driving jobs, an entire “class of jobs,” such that the case should proceed to trial.

Constitutional rights

Outside of the criminal case context, Sotomayor has shown some favor toward suits challenging violation of the Fourth Amendment probable cause and warrant requirements and due process rights.

In a 2002 case, Sotomayor wrote that New York City’s policy of seizing and then keeping for an extended period of time, sometimes for years, vehicles used by alleged drunk drivers or in other misdemeanor crimes violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The City’s ordinance permitted it to file a civil case seeking the forfeiture of vehicles of those found guilty. But the forfeiture cases were often deferred for many months or even years, while the underlying criminal cases were resolved. Sotomayor’s ruling required a meaningful hearing at a meaningful time as to whether the vehicle’s owner could recover it. Her decision reversed the trial court ruling of then-District Judge Michael Mukasey, who later became George Bush’s last attorney general.

In a case seeking damages for a house search based on a flawed warrant, Sotomayor dissented in order to challenge the formulation used by the majority to define when a police officer is entitled to “qualified immunity” from suit for such a violation. The Supreme Court excuses an officer from such constitutional violations unless the law is so clear that an objectively reasonable officer could not believe his conduct is lawful. Sotomayor objected to her circuit’s formulation of this defense that gave police officers extra latitude in meeting that standard.

Sotomayor wrote a 2006 opinion approving suspicionless searches of passenger carry-on luggage and car trunks before boarding a ferry, based on the government’s purported interest in deterring terrorist attacks on large vessels engaged in mass transportation. She joined another decision that struck down a portion of the Patriot Act relating to disclosure of National Security Letters on First Amendment grounds.

In a 2002 case, Sotomayor authored an opinion that gave prison officials wide latitude to infringe prisoner First Amendment rights by withholding incoming mail if they could articulate some security justification for such action. In other cases, Sotomayor has granted latitude to prisoners in exercising religious rights.

Wsws.org… get on their free daily emails for updates on corporate rape and pillage

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Thursday, July 9, 2009

And Harvard economics professor JEFFREY MIRON will weigh in on the state of the U.S. economy—and why the only plausible argument for bailing out banks crumbles on close examination.

Beyond Supreme Court ruling: Romney, Obama, and America don't get Hispanics

Beyond Supreme Court ruling: Romney, Obama, and America don't get Hispanics

PERHAPS IT'S TIME OBAMA AND ROMNEY START TO UNDERSTAND AMERICANS!

NOT ONE LEGAL VOTED TO BE LOOTED BY MEXICO!


VOTERS). SOTOMAYER VOTED AGAINST MAKING E-VERIFY MANDATORY NATION WIDE!

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The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender

28 May 2009

The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.

As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.

No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind.

There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.

Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.

Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.

The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.

Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.

The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.

Patrick Martin

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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”

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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

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OBAMA SELECTED LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS TO ADVANCE THE OBAMA AGENDA OF KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED, AND BUY THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES BY MAKING SURE ILLEGALS GET OUR JOBS! THE EASIEST WAY TO DO THIS IS TO SABOTAGE LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS. OBAMA, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, THE OBAMA DEPT. of LA RAZA JUSTICE, AND THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE SABOTAGING E-VERIFY ALL OVER THE NATION!

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Friday, June 5, 2009

Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor faces new questions about her views on group and identity politics... after it became clear she has a long history of making race-and-gender based remarks. We’ll have a special report. Sotomayor’s views on our Second Amendment rights are the
subject of our face off debate tonight.



*

From the Desk of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton:


Sotomayor Evasive, Disingenuous During Confirmation Hearings

The eagerly anticipated confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor got underway this week. And how did she do?

Let’s start with Sotomayor’s rambling and constantly shifting explanation for one of her most controversial statements – that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” This racist remark was made during a speech Sotomayor delivered to students at Cal Berkeley in 2001. The reason it is getting so much attention is that it calls into question Judge Sotomayor’s impartiality – and she made the remark repeatedly through the years. (Judicial Watch addressed this comment and many other troublesome statements and activities by Sotomayor in a letter to Senators Patrick Leahy, D-VT, and Jeff Sessions, R-AL, last week. You can read it by clicking here.)

During the hearing, at first, Sotomayor dismissed the statement as a “rhetorical flourish” that “fell flat.” However, under subsequent questioning Sotomayor attempted to defend her remarks, indicating that it was an attempt to “inspire” her audience. Of course Sotomayor quickly added that the comment has nothing to do with her attitude towards dispensing justice, which she claims is firmly rooted in the rule of law. (Action by the Supreme Court might argue this point, given that the High Court just overturned the decision she helped make in the Ricci racial discrimination matter. Click here for more.)

Sotomayor also tried to justify the comment by comparing it to allegedly similar ones made by Justice Alito and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. And in another explanation she said her words shouldn’t be taken literally.

“I think she just made it more muddled,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In sum, Judge Sotomayor tried to deny the plain meaning of her “wise Latina” statements. This disingenuous approach may pass muster in Washington, but most people would be troubled by her lawyerly evasions.

Can you recall a Supreme Court nominee in recent years that has had to spend so much time defending their impartiality as a judge? I can’t.

On the issue of abortion Sotomayor said that she feels Roe v Wade is “settled law.” According to The Associated Press: “Supreme Court aspirant Sonia Sotomayor said Tuesday that she considers the question of abortion rights is settled precedent and says there is a constitutional right to privacy...Answering a question later from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sotomayor said that “all precedents of the Supreme Court I consider settled law…” This doesn’t mean much, as the Supreme Court regularly overturns its precedents.

Judge Sotomayor said she had no idea why one of her former colleagues at the New York law firm Pavia & Harcourt would say, "I can guarantee she'll be for abortion rights." Maybe he knew of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s radical pro-abortion agenda when she helped run the organization? But Judge Sotomayor professed to have no clue about the legal positions of her former group, despite the fact that she set the group’s litigation agenda.

Senator Lindsey Graham also initiated a tough, dramatic line of questioning with respect to Sotomayor’s temperament. In fact, Senator Graham flat out asked her: “Do you have a temperament problem?” (Sotomayor has been described as a “bully” on the bench.) Sotomayor attempted to defend herself against the charge but the issue was still left hanging in the hearing room.

Sotomayor’s problem for this hearing was a big one. She has had to defend the indefensible. She did this by reversing course, professing fidelity to the law, disavowing her radical judicial philosophy as described in her many speeches and writings, and by misleading the committee on one some of her more controversial decisions.

The judge went so far as to disavow President Obama’s lawless “empathy” standard for picking judges. Judge Sotomayor said that she would apply the law to the facts. She said, “Judges can’t rely on what is in their heart.”

In the end, she sounded like the most conservative nominee to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president in thirty years. (It is interesting that, even in the age of Obama, liberal jurists must pretend to be conservatives to gain Senate approval. It confirms the victory of conservatives in framing the public policy debate over liberal judicial activism. Even Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court must pretend to reject judicial activism.)

There is no question, given all of her “wise Latina” and other radical statements and her long-term connection to groups such as the far-left Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, that Judge Sotomayor is the wrong judge for a seat on the Supreme Court. I don’t believe her confirmation conversion to “fidelity to the law.”

Unfortunately, Republicans seem resigned to the fact that Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed with little debate, but it’s not too late to change the situation. You must make your voices heard! Even liberal Senator Feinstein (D-CA) admitted this week that she had received calls of concern on the Sotomayor nomination. These calls matter. Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard today at 202-224-3121, and let your senators know your thoughts.

Some in the press have characterized the Sotomayor hearings as “grueling.” I attended them for a bit and I found them interesting – in how a nominee can evade questions, deny her record, and largely control the room in the face of questioning by hapless senators. A well-prepared lawyer like Judge Sotomayor can do these types of hearings in their sleep.

There have been some tough questions for sure, but without an underlying commitment to carefully making the case against this nomination too many of the questions amounted to nothing more than “rhetorical flourishes” that “fall flat.” As a result, Americans may end up with a biased, activist justice on the Supreme Court.

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VIVA LA RAZA?



Sonia Sotomayor opposes E-Verify requirement

True to form, she said it was illegal to make employers e-verify citizen status of new hires.

Interesting, she says a state cannot force employers to check if employees they are hiring are illegal. Thankfully the court ruled 5-3 supporting law. But now we know for sure just how extreme far left Obama's choice was. We cannot afford Obama to get another term, or you can bet this country will be overrun by illegals. I don't want this country to be poor and corrupt like Mexico, which it will if illegals overrun the country.

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Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law

The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano.  (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief).  Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed.  From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.

To date, Arizona’s E-Verify law has been upheld by all lower courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit, in particular, viewed it as an exercise of a state’s traditional power to regulate businesses.  (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2010).  Obama’s Justice Department, however, disagrees. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said in his filing with the Supreme Court that the lower courts were wrong to uphold the statute because federal immigration law expressly preempts any state law imposing sanctions on employers hiring illegal immigrants.  Mr. Katyal argues that this is not a licensing law, but “a statute that prohibits the hiring of unauthorized aliens and uses suspension and revocation of all state-issued licenses as its ultimate sanction.”  (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief, p. 10).  This is the administration’s first court challenge to a state’s authority to act against illegal immigration, and could be a preview of the battle brewing over Arizona’s recent illegal immigration crackdown through SB 1070. 

Napolitano has made no comment on the Department of Justice’s decision to challenge the 2007 law, but federal officials said that she has taken an active part in the debate over whether to do so. (Politico, May 28, 2010).   As Governor of Arizona, Napolitano said she believed the state law was valid and became a defendant in the many lawsuits against it. (Id.).



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Sotomayor’s record: A judicial pragmatist and defender of corporate interests

By Don Knowland
17 July 2009

As a nominee to the US Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor is reliable defender of corporate interests, siding with big business, government authority and the police far more than with the poor, the arrested or the oppressed. With 17 years on the federal courts, the most of any Supreme Court nominee in more than half a century, she is anything but an unknown quantity.

In her five years as a federal district court trial judge, Sotomayor issued hundreds of written decisions. In 12 years on the appellate court, she has been the principal author of over 150 opinions. She joined in the majority opinion in over 350 cases.

A survey of her written decisions reveals a jurist firmly wedded to the bourgeois mainstream, particularly when business interests are at stake, and not given to sweeping formulations. The New York Times legal correspondent assigned to cover the Supreme Court wrote that Sotomayor’s opinions “reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language.”

A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Sotomayor’s rulings could not be easily categorized in ideological terms, and “showed an adherence to precedent, an emphasis on the facts of a case, and an avoidance of overstepping the court’s judicial role.”

According to one of Sotomayor’s former law clerks, “She is a rule-bound pragmatist-very geared toward determining what the right answer is and what the law dictates...” Sotomayor herself has professed to follow a narrow “just the facts” approach to judicial decision-making, a style described by some as judicial minimalism.

However, when important issues arise that affect more fundamental interests of the ruling elite, such as national security matters or big economic questions, Sotomayor comes down invariably on the side of the establishment, at the expense of the majority of society.

A law-and-order judge

As with most former prosecutors, Sotomayor has a negative if not hostile view of the rights of those accused of crimes. Encomiums from her former associates at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and various New York and national police organizations were read into the record of her confirmation hearing.

According to Leroy Frazer Jr., first assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former colleague of Sotomayor, she “has contributed greatly to law enforcement in New York” as a judge. John Siffert, an attorney who taught appellate advocacy with Sotomayor at New York University School of Law for ten years, confirms that she is loath to overturn criminal convictions. “She was not viewed as a pro-defense judge” while she sat as a trial judge, Siffert told the press.

One decision Sotomayor authored as an appellate judge upheld the use of evidence police seized mistakenly, thinking they had a warrant. The Supreme Court’s five-justice conservative bloc came to the same conclusion this year, over the dissent of the court’s four moderate justices. Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who was on the losing side of the January Supreme Court decision, said Judge Sotomayor’s ruling displayed her “willingness to give police the benefit of the doubt.”

One case decided by Sotomayor as an appellate judge involved the timeliness of the habeas corpus petition filed by a prisoner convicted of murder and rape. Congress had only recently passed President Bill Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism-Effective Death Penalty Act, which imposed a one-year time limit on such petitions. Confusion existed in the federal courts regarding how the new law would be applied to pending cases. Following the advice of a court clerk, the defendant’s attorney mailed in rather than filed the appeal the day it was due.

Sotomayor and her colleagues on the case refused to consider the petition, ruling that it was untimely and that its lateness was not excusable. They also summarily brushed off the defendant’s claim to innocence, even though guilt was based on a confession the police coerced when the defendant was 17. The defendant then spent six more years in jail before DNA testing conclusively established his innocence.

Capital and labor

While frequently dissenting against reactionary rulings on issues involving democratic rights, the four-justice moderate bloc on the Supreme Court has increasingly tended to join the court’s right wing in favoring big business over workers and consumers where their economic interests are explicitly counterposed, as in cases involving punitive damage awards against giant corporations.

Sotomayor is unlikely to buck that trend. She currently sits in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears the most important appeals affecting Wall Street and the financial industry. That court’s 2006 decision strongly favored Wall Street in a group of cases involving thousands of investors suing dozens of the largest banks and investment houses, including Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and the now defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The plaintiffs charged massive fraud involving manipulation of the market for initial public offerings of company shares. Such schemes played a major role in inflating the dot.com and telecom bubbles.

As a practical matter, the plaintiffs in the case could proceed only if they could band together for class actions. The appellate ruling dismissed the cases on the basis that questions as to what information and assurances individual plaintiffs relied on in purchasing shares precluded finding sufficient commonality to permit the cases to proceed on a class action basis. This amounted to an extremely strained reading of the rules regarding class action suits and reduced the value of the plaintiffs’ recovery by many billions of dollars.

Sotomayor’s most well known decision as a district court judge involved her issuing an injunction in 1995 against baseball team owners during the longest strike in baseball history, which followed an owner lock-out of players. Sotomayor ruled that the National Relations Labor Board had cause to believe that baseball owners committed unfair labor practices by eliminating free agency and salary arbitration provisions of the expired collective bargaining agreement. She ordered the owners to bargain in good faith on those issues. The strike then ended.

As an appellate judge, Sotomayor has favored working class plaintiffs mainly in disability cases. In one case, Sotomayor ruled that New York did not sufficiently accommodate a dyslexic applicant taking the bar examination.

Sotomayor dissented in a 2003 case brought by the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission against a major trucking company relating to discrimination against drivers who took medication that the company believed impaired driving. Federal regulations provide that discrimination occurs if a company perceives that a worker or workers have an impairment as to a “class of jobs” compared to average persons of comparable skill, as opposed to single jobs. The majority dismissed the case, saying that the evidence showed only that the employer perceived the drivers as incapable of long-distance, stressful driving jobs. Sotomayor argued that there was sufficient evidence that the employer perceived the impairment to extend to any truck driving jobs, an entire “class of jobs,” such that the case should proceed to trial.

Constitutional rights

Outside of the criminal case context, Sotomayor has shown some favor toward suits challenging violation of the Fourth Amendment probable cause and warrant requirements and due process rights.

In a 2002 case, Sotomayor wrote that New York City’s policy of seizing and then keeping for an extended period of time, sometimes for years, vehicles used by alleged drunk drivers or in other misdemeanor crimes violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The City’s ordinance permitted it to file a civil case seeking the forfeiture of vehicles of those found guilty. But the forfeiture cases were often deferred for many months or even years, while the underlying criminal cases were resolved. Sotomayor’s ruling required a meaningful hearing at a meaningful time as to whether the vehicle’s owner could recover it. Her decision reversed the trial court ruling of then-District Judge Michael Mukasey, who later became George Bush’s last attorney general.

In a case seeking damages for a house search based on a flawed warrant, Sotomayor dissented in order to challenge the formulation used by the majority to define when a police officer is entitled to “qualified immunity” from suit for such a violation. The Supreme Court excuses an officer from such constitutional violations unless the law is so clear that an objectively reasonable officer could not believe his conduct is lawful. Sotomayor objected to her circuit’s formulation of this defense that gave police officers extra latitude in meeting that standard.

Sotomayor wrote a 2006 opinion approving suspicionless searches of passenger carry-on luggage and car trunks before boarding a ferry, based on the government’s purported interest in deterring terrorist attacks on large vessels engaged in mass transportation. She joined another decision that struck down a portion of the Patriot Act relating to disclosure of National Security Letters on First Amendment grounds.

In a 2002 case, Sotomayor authored an opinion that gave prison officials wide latitude to infringe prisoner First Amendment rights by withholding incoming mail if they could articulate some security justification for such action. In other cases, Sotomayor has granted latitude to prisoners in exercising religious rights.

Wsws.org… get on their free daily emails for updates on corporate rape and pillage

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Thursday, July 9, 2009

And Harvard economics professor JEFFREY MIRON will weigh in on the state of the U.S. economy—and why the only plausible argument for bailing out banks crumbles on close examination.