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!
*
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
*
“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.”
*
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).
*
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!
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.).
*
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
*
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.