President Obama's radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF (White House backgrounder), one of the racial grievance groups thathelped to sink the judicial nomination of Honduran-born Miguel Estrada in 2003.
Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition againstPresident George W. Bush's2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and a weary Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.
Today LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit,hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. "As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic," thegroup said in a written statement. (PDF)
According to the group's website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
