Public Employee Press

Obama makes history
Names Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court

President Barack Obama wrote a new chapter in American history May 26 when he nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court.

Sotomayor, 55, would be the first Latina and the third woman ever on the panel of nine lifetime appointees.

Brains and determination took her from a South Bronx housing project to Princeton University, where she graduated with the highest honors, and on to Yale Law School, where she edited the Law Journal.

In 1992, Republican President George W. Bush named Sotomayor to the federal District Court, and in 1998 Democrat Bill Clinton elevated her to the Court of Appeals. With her distinguished 30-year career as a prosecutor, litigator and federal judge, she has more judiciary experience than any Supreme Court nominee in the last century.

Obama said he chose the best-qualified candidate, one with “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law, an ability to provide clear answers to complex legal questions” and “an understanding that a judge’s job is to interpret, not make, law.”

Conservatives have launched a campaign to derail her nomination, calling her a judicial “activist” who would go beyond the dictates of the law to support affirmative action and claims of discrimination, a charge that is false according to careful analyses of the 450 cases she has ruled on. Unions have praised her decision that ended the 1995 baseball strike by stopping team owners from illegally changing their contract with the players, and she has shown unyielding support for First Amendment rights, civil rights, labor rights and the environment.

Sotomayor said, “I believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights. . . . It would be a profound privilege for me to play a role in applying those principles to the questions and controversies we face today.”

— Diane S. Williams