Sonia Sotomayor

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    For the sake of all of us, Sonia Sotomayor needs to retire from the US supreme court | Mehdi Hasan

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    Forget Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.Whether it was her lone dissent in a North Carolina voting rights case in 2016 (“the court’s conclusion … is a fiction”); her ingenious referencing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin and WEB DuBois in another 2016 dissent over unreasonable searches and seizures; or her withering observation at the Dobbs oral argument in 2021 (“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”), Sotomayor has stood head and shoulders above both her liberal and conservative colleagues on the bench for the past 15 years.And so it is with good reason that she has been called the “conscience of the supreme court” (the Nation), “the truth teller of the supreme court” (New York Times) and “the real liberal queen of the court” (Above the Law).I happen to agree 100% with all of those descriptions. But – and it pains me to write these words – I also believe it is time for Sotomayor to retire.Why?Okay, now it is time to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To recall how RBG, who had survived two bouts of cancer, refused to quit the court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term office. To hark back to her insistence, in multiple interviews, that it was “misguided” to insist she retire and that she would only stand down “when it’s time”. To recollect how, on her deathbed in 2020, she told her granddaughter that her “most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed” – and how it made no difference whatsoever! Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett as RBG’s replacement just eight days after her death, and Senate Republicans confirmed Barrett to RBG’s vacant seat just eight days before election day.With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself? Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. Of course, only Sotomayor knows the full status of her health, still it is public knowledge that she has had type 1 diabetes since she was seven; had paramedics called to her home; and is the only sitting justice to have, reportedly, traveled with a medic. To be clear: she could easily – and God willing – survive a potential Trump second term and still be dishing out dissents from the bench come 2029.But why take that risk? Why not retire now? Why not quit the bench at the same age that justices in Belgium, Australia and Japan are forced to do so?Let’s deal with the three most obvious objections.First, wouldn’t a replacement for Sotomayor that Senator Joe Manchin has to approve be less progressive, and more centrist, than our sole Latina, super-progressive justice? Perhaps. But, again, consider the alternative. Would we rather Biden replace Sotomayor with a centrist in 2024 … or Trump replace her with a far-right Federalist Society goon in 2025? Or, what if Trump doesn’t win but the Republican party takes control of the Senate and blocks a second-term Biden from replacing her between 2025 and 2028?Second, is there really any difference between a 6-3 conservative majority on the court and a 7-2 majority? Isn’t all lost already? Not quite. The damage to our democracy from a 7-2 hard-right court would be on a whole other and existential level. Yes, 6-3 has been a disaster for our progressive priorities (Dobbs! Bruen! Kennedy!) but there have also been a handful of key 5-4 victories (Redistricting! Razor wire at the border! Ghost guns!) in cases where Roberts plus one other conservative have come over from the dark side. None of that happens in a 7-2 court. The hard-right conservatives win not just most of the time but every single time.Third, how can anyone on the left dare ask the first, and only, Latina justice to quit the supreme court?It’s simple. Women in general, and Latinas especially, will suffer most from a 7-2 supreme court. It is because I am so worried about the future of minority rights in this country that I – reluctantly – want Sotomayor to step aside.This has nothing to do with her race or her gender. Forget RBG (again). Consider Stephen Breyer. You remember Breyer, right? The bookish and bespectacled liberal justice who quit the supreme court in 2022, at the age of 83, in part because of an intense pressure campaign from the left.The fact that he was a white man didn’t shield him from criticism – or from calls for him to stand down. In 2021, the progressive group Demand Justice sent a billboard truck to circle the supreme court building with the message: “Breyer, retire.” I joined in, too. “Retire, retire, retire,” I said in a monologue for my Peacock show in 2021. “Or history may end up judging you, Justice Breyer.”So why is it okay to pressure Breyer to retire but not Sotomayor? This time round, Demand Justice isn’t taking a position on whether an older liberal justice should quit while a Democratic president and Senate can still replace them and, as HuffPost reports, “on the left, there is little open debate about whether she should retire.”Democrats, it seems, still don’t seem keen on wielding power or influence over the highest court in the nation. In 2013, Barack Obama met with RBG for lunch and tried to nudge her into retiring, but as the New York Times later reported, Obama “did not directly bring up the subject of retirement to Justice Ginsburg”.Compare and contrast with Donald Trump. The finance journalist David Enrich, in his book Dark Towers, reveals how the Trump family carried out a “coordinated White House charm offensive” to persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire in 2018. Trump himself, according to Vanity Fair, “worked for months to assure Kennedy his legacy would be in good hands”.The offensive was a success. Out went self-styled moderate Kennedy, in came the hard-right political operative Brett Kavanaugh.If there is to be a change to the supreme court in 2024, Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have only a few months left to make it happen. And yet they don’t seem too bothered about Sotomayor’s age or health. Last week, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called it “a personal decision for her to make”.A personal decision? The prospect of a 7-2 conservative supreme court, with a far-right Federalist Soceity apparatchik having taken “liberal queen” Sotomayor’s seat on the bench, should fill us all with dread.Biden, elected Democrats, and liberals and progressives across the board should be both publicly and privately encouraging Sotomayor to consider what she wants her legacy to be, to remember what happened with RBG, and to not take any kind of gamble with the future of our democracy.If insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, then I’m sorry but a liberal supreme court justice about to enter her 70s and refusing to retire on a Democratic president and Democratic Senate’s watch is nothing short of insane.
    Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Zeteo More

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      DC media makes meal of supposed Sotomayor restaurant sighting

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      DC media makes meal of supposed Sotomayor restaurant sightingNewsletter reports supreme court justice dined with Democrats after incorrectly identifying Chuck Schumer’s wife as the justice

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      The most Washington website of all was forced to issue a diplomatic correction on Saturday, in a second recent iteration of perhaps the most Washington story of all: mistaken reporting about diners at Le Diplomate, a restaurant popular with DC politicos.‘When QAnon and the Tea Party have a baby’: Ron Johnson will run again for US SenateRead moreThe website in question was Politico, the capital and Capitol-covering tipsheet which with characteristic capitals informed readers of its Playbook email: “SPOTTED: Speaker NANCY PELOSI, Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER, Sen[ators] AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-Minn) and DICK DURBIN (D-Ill) and Justice SONIA SOTOMAYOR dining together at Le Diplomate on Friday night.”The email also offered readers a “pic from our intrepid tipster”.Alas, it did not show Sotomayor.The “pic” showed French café tables, waiters, diners and a woman turning from her dessert to talk to Klobuchar, who was maskless and sitting opposite a masked-up Durbin. Schumer’s distinctive hairline could be seen next to Durbin and Pelosi could be seen, also maskless, to the right of a dark-haired woman with her back turned: supposedly the supreme court justice.Politico might have paused before pressing send. Not only could the supposed Sotomayor’s face not be seen but only last month another supposed scandal at “Le Dip” proved to be a “le flop”.Then, a former Republican aide tweeted that Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, had been turned away.In fact, they were being seated outside. Politico covered the slip, reporting: “Within minutes we at Playbook were looped into this seemingly momentous news and were pretty excited ourselves to write about it today. Alas, our enthusiasm was dashed when we heard back from a Buttigieg spox who said there was nothing to it.”On Friday, a Sotomayor sighting would have been news. One of three liberal justices on the supreme court, she had not appeared in person for oral arguments earlier, over Joe Biden’s Covid vaccine mandate for private employers.Furthermore, in that hearing she had made an inaccurate claim about the Omicron-fuelled Covid-19 surge, saying: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”As the Washington Post fact-checker put it, that was “wildly incorrect”, as “according to HHS data, as of 8 January there are about 5,000 children hospitalised … either with suspected Covid or a confirmed laboratory test”.The Politico photo also came amid continuing speculation about when or if another liberal, Stephen Breyer, might retire, thereby giving Joe Biden a pick for the court before possible loss of the Senate. Schumer would shepherd any nominee into place.Alas for Politico, it soon became clear its tipster was wrong. The woman in the picture was Iris Weinshall, the chief operating officer of the New York Public Library, who is married to Schumer. A correction ensued but to make matters worse, Weinshall was initially identified only by her husband’s name. To make matters worse still, Schumer’s office told other outlets that unlike in le grande affaire de Buttigieg, Politico had not called to check on the tip from “Le Dip”.Politico acknowledged the slip and said standards had not been met.“We deeply regret the error,” it said.TopicsWashington DCUS politicsSonia SotomayorUS supreme courtChuck SchumerNancy PelosiAmy KlobucharnewsReuse this content More

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      'This is not justice': supreme court liberals slam Trump's federal executions

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      The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life.“This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday.Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades“To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.“There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”.He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death.“What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’”Breyer went further than Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also dissented in the Higgs case but did not give an explanation.Higgs’s petition for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, it said.He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for the first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” the US district judge Peter Messitte wrote in December.Arguably the most high-profile execution of the Trump administration came just days ago when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection at Terre Haute and became the first woman put to death by the federal government almost seven decades.Her lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.Many believe officials rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden is inaugurated on 20 January. Biden has stated his desire to have the death penalty abolished at federal and state level. More