First from The Politico:
The White House moved Friday to try to tamp down a swirling controversy over a 2001 speech in which Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor suggested that Hispanic women make better judges than white men.
“I’m sure she would have restated it,” President Barack Obama said in an interview with NBC News, referring to Sotomayor’s speech that was later reprinted in a law journal. “But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote what’s clear is she was simply saying that her life experiences will give information about the struggle, the hardships that people are going through, that will make her a good judge.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went a little further, saying, “I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor.”
But the problem is that her “Latin women are wiser than white men” statement was also uttered in 1994, not just recently:
Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that “a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion in dueling cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes the line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, if Prof. Martha Minnow is correct, there can never be a universal definition of ‘wise.’ Second, I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.
Sotomayor delivered multiple speeches between 1994 and 2003 in which she suggested “a wise Latina woman” or “wise woman” judge might “reach a better conclusion” than a male judge.
She delivered the first of those speeches in Puerto Rico in 1994 and then before the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York in April 1999.
The summary descriptions of her speeches indicate she delivered remarks similar to the 1994 speech on three other occasions in 1999 and 2000 during two addresses at Yale and one at the City University of New York School of Law.
Her repeated use of the phrases “wise Latina woman” and “wise woman” undermine the Obama administration’s assertions that the statement was simply a poor choice of words.
Therefore, Sotomayor’s belief of “a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion” is much more than a single mis-statement, but rather a genuine belief.
But this is exactly why all of you voted for Obama in 2008 and a Congress full of Democrats in 2006. Don’t you dare come to me today with “buyer’s remorse” or I’ll kick you in the crotch.
Sotomayor, richness of her experience, wise Latina woman
