Oh, to Be a Fly on the Wall in the Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is sorry for being a bit of a jerk to one of her fellow Justices. Last week she attacked Justice Kavanaugh as a wealthy brat who probably didn’t know any people who worked for a living.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized a fellow member of the US Supreme Court for failing to grasp the real-world effects of an unsigned order last year that allowed immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles to resume.

“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, referencing a concurrence written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during an event Tuesday hosted by the University of Kansas School of Law. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

In a Sept. 8 emergency order issued without any majority rationale, the justices paused lower court rulings temporarily barring immigration agents from targeting people based solely on their language, occupation, race, or presence at locations such as car washes or bus stops.

In a concurrence, Kavanaugh asserted that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are “typically brief,” and impacted individuals “promptly go free.”

Two points of clarification. First, Sotomayor never mentioned Kavanaugh by name but everyone knew who she was talking about. Second, what Kavanaugh actually said was that race couldn’t be used as the sole grounds for a stop but it could be a contributing factor, something which seems obvious in a country where a majority of illegal immigrants are of Hispanic origin.

In his emergency docket opinion concerning immigration raids in Los Angeles, Kavanaugh wrote that immigration officers can consider a person’s race, language and occupation in forming a reason to stop someone for an immigration check.

“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors,” Kavanaugh wrote.

This week, Justice Sotomayor is regretting what she said last week, apparently after she got inquiries from the media.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a rare public apology on Wednesday for criticizing a Supreme Court colleague, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in surprisingly personal terms during a public appearance last week.

“I made remarks that were inappropriate,” Justice Sotomayor said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times and other media outlets. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”

This is where I really wish I could be a fly on the wall. I wonder how that apology went? Was Kavanaugh gracious? I suspect he was, but I also wonder if he might have pointed out that he does know one or two people with blue collar jobs. I’m preferring to imagine that he pointed out how wrong she was before he let her off the hook.

Sotomayor has been on the court since 2009 and before that she was a federal judge for another 17 years. Before that she worked at a corporate law firm (Pavia & Harcourt, where she became a partner) and before that she was a New York DA  hired directly out of law school. And before that she went to Princeton and then to Yale Law School (she admits she had help from affirmative action, saying, “My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale.”)

So may I suggest that it has been a long, long time since Sotomayor has been anything but part of the upper crust. Really, you have to go back to the era of bell bottoms and ABBA to get to a time when she was surrounded by regular people.

Anyway, we’ll probably never know what was said between her and Kavanaugh. This is one time I wish the court would leak a little more.

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