All You Need To Know About Far Left Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor…

Personally, if Obama picked her, it tells me that she must be a dirtbag of the highest order.  But that’s just me, now let’s let the folks who know the Supreme Court best fill us in on the real skinny the media is too biased to report and t…

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@MataHarley: Wow, good job finding that case! I took the SCOTUSblog guy at his word, but I guess his point was that at the time Alito was nominated he had a 100% record of reversals, and it would have been silly for the Dems to use that against him. I kinda regret even picking that nit considering how much effort it must’ve taken to look through those cases, but it does underscore that this is a vague and ultimately quite meaningless statistic. All things, I agree with the bulk of what you’ve been saying – we’ll have to debate Ricci some other night

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Triz, I read that old article on Alito already. It does not state there were *only* two that came before the Supremes, only mentions those two as “some rulings”. The subject of the article was his conservative judicial philosophy, not reversals… thereby naming all the cases the SCOTUS may have heard. Meaning that article is not indicative of how many of his opinions have been heard at the High Court. That’s why I didn’t cite it. It’s incomplete info.

But even at that, your 100% is completely incorrect.

The Beard v Banks 1st amendment right case had not yet been decided by the High Court at the time of that article. Alito had dissented with the 3rd Circuit’s ruling affirming that prison rules that keep newspapers and magazines out of the hands of disruptive Pennsylvania inmates violates their 1st Amendment rights. The Supremes agreed with Alito’s dissent, and reversed the lower courts decision. Thus the SCOTUS and Alito were on the same page.

The SCOTUS did reverse Rompilla v. Beard (2004), where Alito wrote the majority opinion. That’s one reversal.

In Homar v. Gilbert (1996), Alito dissented from the majority who ruled a campus police officer’s due process was violated when they suspended him without pay and a hearing after a drug arrest. Alito did say that the suspension had merit, tho he still disagreed with the majority. THe SCOTUS did reverse that decision… which again puts that in the plus column. So far, two for three.

INRE Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey – a whole different banana. Alito actually agreed with most of the Circuits reasoning upholding a law that placed limitation on abortions. But he dissented with the majority who asserted that the state could require women to notify their husbands before having an abortion. This put him in an “almost agree” status with the Circuit. But “almost” don’t cut it in judicial opinions. So he dissented.

The SCOTUS upheld the majority, but again it had to do with the quest to uphold *most* portions of the law. Meaning “almost” was good enough for 5 of the Supremes. In his dissent, Rehnquist quoted Alito. Oddly enough, that same case was used by pro-life conservatives to portray Alito as being abortion friendly. So that’s a “sorta” reversal…. meaning a SCOTUS reversal to his dissenting issue on the wives’ notification of husbands, but the also sustained the portions of that law that Alito agreed with. Like I said… a different banana, and more complex argument.

So that’s two sustained, one reversal, and one weird banana as a record…. at least for the four cases that we know of. But as I said, these were articles examining Alito’s judicial philosophy, not a laundry list of his cases that have appeared before SCOTUS. It might also be noted that if four is the magic number, Alito was on the 3rd Circuit court for 16 years (1990 to 2006).

By contrast, Sotomayor has been on the 2nd Circuit for 10.5 years with 5 cases before the Court, one pending, and another likely on the way. Seven in 10.5 years. Makes me wonder about that “more experience than any…” claim bandied about. They must be including lots of lower court experience to get to that assessment.

Ultimately, I think we are on the same page in some way. The numbers of cases heard aren’t as important. But I do think the nature of the reversals and the substance of the issue does. I think the coup d’œil for Sotomayor, if one is possible with this Congress and admin, can be a reversal on Ricci. If this traditionally liberal SCOTUS can find it possible to reverse a blatant affirmative action ruling by her, then she’s way out of touch with the current robed ones.

Short of that, her confirmation is as predictable as midnight rolling around this eve.

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@MataHarley: Alito’s reversal rate is 100%; the two rulings that the supreme court reviewed were both overturned (CNN reports the key cases here, and this was apparently pointed out by SCOTUSblog on the Maddow show, he also mentions that in the two big reversals she was in concordance with Souter). From what I could find, Thomas and Roberts didn’t have any rulings looked at by the Supreme Court. It looks to me like this is a statistic which has too small a sample size to matter.

Otherwise, I agree with you that the substance of the judgments is what’s important. My point is that the howls of “affirmative action pick” and “reverse racism” don’t hold when the issue is policy and not credentials. Frankly, it’s a bludgeon and it cheapens the claims against true reverse racism.

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And thanks for the note on the missing criminal cases, triz. You’re welcome for the link. It’s a good blog.

And speaking of… today’s SCOTUSblog post opens up the possibility of yet another Sotomayor-related opinion landing in the robed one’s laps… INRE child custody across international boundaries.

But going back to that “average”. I’ve tried to find stats of reversals on Alito… none to be found. The reasoning as to why it was not “news” then can only be speculation – but that speculation would have to be because it wasn’t extraordinarily high. Instead, Alito’s confirmation period was fraught with “investigations” of his “judicial philosopy”. Interesting that’s fair game for Alito, but not for Sotomayor in this parallel universe and “remade America”. Because, quite frankly, I’m not arguing she doesn’t have plenty of “experience”. I am arguing that the experience she has is laden with judicial philosophy that I find dangerous precedent.

Dissenting opinions can be cogent, and very impressive reads. I can admire the thought pattern one takes to get to a wrong decision, but that does not mean I admire injecting emotions and empathy into the court system at the highest level is a wise one.

There are many cases brought before the SCOTUS (and they take lifetimes to come up with opinions on many…). However I am unaware of any previous nominee that has such a high reversal rate tied to their performance personally.

And I’m willing to “reverse” myself on that if you can come up with stats on other robed ones with a similar overturn record. Other than that, I find that an “average” that is unacceptable for the Supreme law of the land.

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@MataHarley: The 380 figure comes from civil and criminal cases, as SCOTUSblog mentioned “A summary of additional civil cases, as well as Judge Sotomayor’s leading criminal law opinions will follow.” (thanks for the link, btw). You’re right that the cases could have been dropped for reasons other than being sound decisions, and other covariates (median income of the constituency, crime rates, number of property disputes) would probably make it difficult even to compare to a nation-wide average. But even if we look at just the reversal averages, her 60-66% is still lower than the average which is generally in the 70% range (MediaMatters *sigh* collected from SCOTUSblog).

Of note, Eric Posner looked at the statistics on her by other markers of productivity and quality (admittedly subjective terms, but they come at it from a reasonably scientific perspective) and she holds up well with Alito on most measures, if not a bit less sensational (low number of invocations) and a bit less independent (agreeing with co-partisans) but still to the right of her fellow judges.

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trizzlor #16: A little context – she’s written 380 opinions, of which 5 went to the supremes and 3 were overturned. I’m not a lawyer but my understanding is that this is quite average for the Supreme Court and the low number of her cases that actually went there implies that those 375 majority opinions were quite sound.

First of all, triz… let’s straighten out *your* context. Plus you have the wrong total number of opinions. According to SCOTUSblog, who I’m more apt to believe since the entire thrust of their blog is to follow these cases, that number is 150 opinions, not 380.

But no matter, because the batting average isn’t the sum total of all decisions for many reasons. Nor should a life long position to SCOTUS be offered to one with an “average” of 60% overturned. We’re not looking for “average” on the High Court.

First, the cases that were heard by the Supreme Court are no pronouncement on how “sound” the previous decisions were. What that means is that those cases decided not to continue the appellate process to the High Court for sundry reasons… not the least of which can be expense. If you want to judge “sound” on any of those, you’d have to first find out:

1: How many could not afford to continue the appellate process, but would have liked to
2: How many actually submitted a request for a SCOTUS hearing and were denied

The rest may have discontinued for, as I said, expense, or perhaps a settlement that was more cost effective than continuing the fight.

What we know about her decisions is that 5 went to the Supremes to be heard, and 60% of those were overturned… one was a unanimous overturned decision to boot. Boy ain’t that one for the annals… the SCOTUS united. That doesn’t bode well to be THAT far off.

What we also know about her decisions is there is a sixth pending a decision right now, INRE affirmative action… Ricci v DeStefano. If that is overturned, her record of overturns moves up to 66.6%

And what we also don’t know is how many more are on the path there…. most notably the RKBA case, Maloney v. Cuomo 2009. If that shows up, there had better be one robed one, officially recusing herself for that hearing.

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You said you didn’t remember. I already knew the answer.

It’s simply not my responsibility to do your research for you, thus no links provided.

I’m not teetering on the brink of a “the left does it so it’s OK” type argument.

That’s not my style.

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I think we both need a bit more book learnin’; and yet here you are teetering on the brink of another “the left does it so it’s okay” debate. Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised you didn’t fire back with a few links to Kos or HuffPo – progress? For what it’s worth, MataHarley, as usual, digs into the actual substantive policy differences.

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@trizzlor:

You should read more.

That’s my point.

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