From Buchanan's June 2 syndicated column:
Like Lani Guinier, the Clinton appointee rejected for reverse racism, Sonia Sotomayor is a quota queen. She believes in, preaches and practices race-based justice. Her burying the appeal of the white New Haven firefighters, who were denied promotions they had won in competitive exams, was a no-brainer for her.
In her world, equal justice takes a back seat to tribal justice.
Now, people often come out to vote for one of their own. Catholics for JFK, evangelicals for Mike Huckabee, women for Hillary Clinton, Mormons for Mitt Romney, Jews for Joe Lieberman and African-Americans for Barack Obama. That is political reality and an exercise of political freedom.
But tribal justice is un-American.
In the 1950s and 1960s, this country reached consensus that denying black men and women the equal opportunity to advance and succeed must come to an end. Discrimination based on race, color or ethnicity, we agreed, was wrong.
Sotomayor, however, has an exception to the no-discrimination rule. She believes in no discrimination, unless done to white males and to benefit people like her.
How can any Republican senator vote to elevate to the Supreme Court a judge who, all her life, has believed in, preached and practiced race discrimination against white males, without endorsing the Obama-Sotomayor view that diversity trumps equal justice, and race-based justice should have its own seat on the high court?
Down the path Sotomayor would take us lies an America where Hispanic justices rule for Hispanics, black judges rule for blacks and white judges rule for white folks.
[...]
But why should the white working and middle class stay with the GOP? Its presidents exported their jobs to Mexico, China and Asia, and threw open America's doors to tens of millions, legal and illegal, from the Third World, who have swamped their cities and towns. If the GOP will not end race-based affirmative action, which threatens the futures of their children, why vote for the GOP?
Why should white folks vote for anyone who says, “We are against race discrimination, unless it is discrimination against you”?
Obama would not have selected Sotomayor if he did not share her convictions. And there is nothing in his writings or career to hint at disagreement. Thus it comes down to the senators, especially the Republicans. A vote for Sonia Sotomayor is a vote to affirm that race-based justice deserves its own seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
But if that happens, it will not only be the race consciousness of Hispanics that will be on the rise in the good old U.S.A.
Supreme Court litigator Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog writes of Sotomayor and race-related cases:
In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.
Previously:
During “white males” rant, Buchanan calls Sotomayor “that woman”; Shrum calls on him to apologize
Buchanan: “lightweight” Sotomayor “an anti-white, liberal judicial activist”