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Besides reversing another Sotomayor vote, wasn't one of the justices reversing her the very guy she's replacing? And that guy is not exactly a right-wing wacko.
8 posted on July 1, 2009 12:20:22 AM EDT by Texas Eagle

No, she’s replacing Souter and he voted with the other three libs.

While it is true that Souter, along with Ginzberg, Breyer and Stevens all dissented (in a single opinion) with the SCOTUS ruling overturning the appeals court ruling which Sotomayor supported, not even the minority opinion actually upheld the lower court ruling. The minority would have remanded the case back to the lower court with instructions to, as the saying goes, "Give the white firefighters a fair trial first - then hang them."
I make no doubt that their fig leaf was a sop to Kennedy, who after all might be attracted to the liberal side on the next case on the docket, rather than reflecting their own predilections were they to have an outright liberal majority on the court. But the contrast between their ruling and the offhand dismissal of the white firefighters' case by Sotomayor et al at the appellate level is still pretty stark.
In his concurrence with the Court's ruling, Justice Alito pointed out that New Haven, the defendant, placed reliance on the opinion of a consultant who was interested in currying favor with the mayor - and that it was the mayor who actually had the final decision. And also that the mayor was under pressure from a community organizer. Since the mayor had the final say in any event, the board which "made the decision" to reject the test which the white firefighters passed was simply a fig leaf for the mayor's own decision. And Alito said that "a reasonable jury could find" (i.e., there apparently was sufficient paper trail to prove) that the mayor had in fact already made up his mind that the tests would be overturned, and it was only a question of whether the board nominally responsible for the decision went his way or had to be overruled.