Sonia Sotomayor admits she was an "affirmative action baby"; said it's "critical that we promote diversity"; there are "cultural biases built into testing"

If we could replace the GOP leadership with the Washington Post and the New York Times, we might be able to block Sonia Sotomayor. As it is, even Charlie Savage of the NYT offering "Videos Shed New Light on Sotomayor’s Positions" (link) probably won't have much of an impact unless regular citizens - i.e., you - send that article to everyone you know and encourage them to do the same. The way to block her is to turn public opinion against her; the GOP won't do that so we need to. One of the ways would be to obtain the videos and create a highlight reel that can be uploaded to Youtube.

The article describes how some of her decisions have fallen on the conservative side - including some of her positions on using international law. However, the rest is rather unfavorable:

The [video clips released to the Senate] include lengthy remarks about her experiences as an “affirmative action baby” whose lower test scores were overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law School because, she said, she is Hispanic and had grown up in poor circumstances.

“If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of those institutions, it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted,” she said on a panel of three female judges from New York who were discussing women in the judiciary. The video is dated “early 1990s” in Senate records.

Her comments came in the context of explaining why she thought it was “critical that we promote diversity” by appointing more women and members of minorities as judges, and they provoked objections among other panelists who pointed out that she had graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and been an editor on Yale’s law journal.

But Judge Sotomayor insisted that her test scores were sub-par - “though not so far off the mark that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.” Her scores have not been made public.

“With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates,” she said. “And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.”

Thu, 06/11/2009 - 11:12 · · Importance: 4