www.LC.org

Washington, DC – The confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor begin today at 10:00 a.m. in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building. Liberty Counsel will blog the entire hearing at www.LC.org. PBS will televise the hearings (http://www.pbs.org/stationfinder/index.html). Each member of the Senate Judiciary Committee will be permitted to deliver opening statements, with Sotomayor’s statement to begin at approximately 1:30 p.m.

The Democratic-led Senate has rushed these hearings before there has been adequate time to evaluate Sotomayor’s past rulings and statements. While she was actively serving on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1980-1992, the PRLDEF filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing in favor of abortion. She served on the Litigation Committee for eight years and chaired the committee for four. The group opposed the death penalty, opposed the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, supported federal funding of abortion, and compared abortion restrictions to slavery. PRLDEF also supported the abortion rights group, NOW, and other extreme groups, such as ACORN.

Sotomayor tried to bury the now-infamous case of the firefighters by issuing it as a nonpublished opinion, so that her fellow judges would not be aware of the case. A colleague, Judge Jose Cabranes, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, discovered the case when he read a story in the local newspaper, where the attorney for the firefighters complained after receiving the court’s ruling. In the article, the attorney said she expected “a reasoned legal opinion, instead of an unpublished summary order, on what I saw as the most significant race case to come before the Circuit Court in 20 years.” When Judge Cabranes began to dig for more information, he became sufficiently alarmed that he called for the full court to rehear the case. He wrote his now-famous opinion excoriating his colleagues for ducking the hard issues presented by the case, which ultimately got the attention of the Supreme Court. On June 30, the firefighters received justice when the High Court reversed the ruling. Sotomayor allowed her personal bias to interfere with justice.

Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “The American people want justice to be administered by judges who are neutral umpires – not activist policymakers. Sonia Sotomayor has a history of judicial activism. She openly admits that she judges using personal prejudice rather than impartial neutrality. This is not the kind of justice we expect from judges.”