Sotomayor is up for final confirmation by the full Senate by Friday. It is evident from her writings that she bears resentment towards the United States (because Puerto Rico did not freely join the U.S.) and she sees the United States as an alien culture. Law is culturally specific, and it is STUPID to have, as a final arbiter and interpreter of U.S. laws, someone who has admitted to being an alien in the culture of the United States. See below for proof.



Is Being a Supreme Court Justice one of those “Jobs Americans Won’t Do”?

“Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor may not have been born in Puerto Rico, but friends and relatives say she is Puerto Rican through and through.”
-CNN


Most Americans do not want a Puerto Rican on the Supreme Court of the United States; we want an American, and we would be fine with an American of Puerto Rican descent. What would we say if a Supreme Court nominee were described as, “Although not born in France, so and so is a Frenchman through and through”? Would we want such a person serving as one of nine people composing a pillar of the United States political and social system? France gave us the Statue of Liberty, French ideas are part of our heritage, but we still want an American, not a Frenchman, serving on our Supreme Court. Being a Supreme Court Justice is not one of those “jobs Americans will not do.”

Not only do Sotomayor’s friends and relatives describe her as thoroughly Puerto Rican, her own words to the Connecticut Hispanic Bar Association in October, 1998 [see under question 12D on that page] clearly indicate that she identifies as a “Puerto Rican Latina” with a “Puerto Rican soul”, and identifies “so strongly” with Puerto Rico. Nowhere in the speech does she identify herself as an American.

... why individuals like us, many of us whom were born in this completely different American culture, still identify so strongly with the island in which our parents were born and raised."

"I became a Puerto Rican Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life. My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Puerto Rican soul. They taught me to love America, to value its lesson that great things could be achieved if one works hard for it.

It is terrific that she loves America, but those are not the sentiments of an American.
The entire speech is available on the website of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She delivered the speech as a 44-year-old graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, and a federal Appeals Court judge. Her adult identity was formed and she certainly had the intellectual capability to understand America. She also says in the speech:

Somewhere all of us Hispanics have had a defining moment when we were shocked into learning that we were different and that American society treated us differently. The shock and sense of being an alien will never again, I suspect, be as profound for any of us as that first experience because I know from personal experience that our education and professional training have equipped us to deal better in this sometimes alien land.

Americans don’t want somebody who has felt like an “alien” in the United States, and still “sometimes” feels that the United States is an “alien land” serving on an institution that has an enormous impact on the United States. Notice that she says, “The shock and sense of being an alien will never again, I suspect, be as profound for any of us as that first experience.” There was a “first experience” of feeling like an alien, and there were others; she has felt like an “alien” repeatedly in the United States.

Maybe this situation exists because Sotomayor is a first-generation American and not yet fully assimilated. Well, then, can’t we find a person of Hispanic heritage who is fully assimilated to serve on the Supreme Court? A friend who is a first generation American, both of whose parents are from the Philippines, says that even for her parents, being of Filipino heritage “is the sprinkles on the sundae.” But for Sotomayor, her heritage is what she is. My friend also said that sometimes people ask her where she is from, and she knows they are asking about her heritage, and she just answers, “I’m American.”

I want to be totally fair to Sotomayor. In a 1996 speech to the Hofstra University Latino and Latina American Law Students Association, she said,

Although I am an American, love my country and could achieve its opportunity of succeeding at anything I worked for, that I also have a Latina soul and heart, with the magic that carries.

Yet even that statement is prefaced by “although.” She doesn’t fully embrace being an American. Her 1998 speech contained many of the same things as her 1996 speech, but she had dropped the half-hearted reference to being an American.

Continuing with her 1998 speech, Sotomayor apparently does not want children with Puerto Rican ancestry to assimilate:

Nevertheless, although we should not attempt to isolate ourselves from the larger society, we also must steadfastly refuse to lose our unique identities and perspectives in this process.

From these technological advances, our children will have more opportunities to enjoy, but it will be harder for them to hold on to their ethnic identities. But hold on to them we must because Puerto Ricans, Latinos and all minority groups, despite what part of the country we live in, face enormous challenges in this society.

She seems to be saying that they face challenges because the culture is alien. By that logic if they would assimilate and become Americans, the culture wouldn’t be alien and they wouldn’t face challenges!

When she speaks of future generations of people who happen to be of Puerto Rican ancestry, “hold on to them [our ethnic identities] we must,” that is directly against the foundation of American unity that is on every dollar bill: E Pluribus Unum.

Sotomayor just doesn’t seem to get E Pluribus Unum. “Out of many, one.”
Every new immigrant group makes a contribution, that contribution strengthens the United States, and the formerly immigrant group gains acceptance as Americans, and the descendants are simply Americans of whatever heritage.

The Senators who are uneasy with Sotomayor’s confirmation have confined themselves to asking questions about her judicial record and about whether she will judge cases in an unbiased manner. Why does it seem to be off-limits to ask her whether she is an American and to explain the comments she made in this speech?

The United States was founded upon E Pluribus Unum and it has worked. Yet based on her 1998 speech, Sotomayor does not subscribe to E Pluribus Unum and is highly ambivalent about whether she is an American. Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court could be a concrete step towards the unraveling of the United States as a cohesive and coherent nation. Tragically, this will occur precisely when the United States was closer than ever to the goal of a nation in which anybody of any race, religion, or ethnicity can be embraced as an American, and any American, no matter what their skin color, can rise as far as his or her abilities will take her.