Wise Latinas vs Smart Blondes

Disclosure: My daughter was blonde, politically incorrect, and collected blonde jokes. No actual blondes were harmed in any way during the preparation of this article…

Related: Judicial Rock: “Injunction Junction, What’s Your Function? …”

Joke: A smart blonde, a dumb blonde, Santa Claus, and a wise latina are walking down the street when they spot a $10 bill on the sidewalk. Q. Which one picked it up? A. The dumb blonde, of course, all the others are figments of your imagination!

I postulate that smart blondes are actually far more common than self proclaimed “wise latinas,” because, based on exhibit A, above, that wise latina is a figment of her own imagination!

Why am I poking fun at Obama’s affirmative action hire? Because Sonya Sotomayor actually believes in making policy and law from the bench, and believes it should be exclusively liberal policy and laws to boot. Why else would she have made such an asinine public statement against justices who are following the law and the Consistution?

Supreme Court Justices should generally, like Victorian children, be “seen and not heard” with the exception of oral arguments, rendering of verdicts, and non-partisan speeches. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor have both spoken out publicly decrying President Trump and his policies, which is bad form at least, and potentially grounds for recusal from cases involving the Trump Administration.

The area which seems to be causing the most TDS for the ‘wise latina’ is that the Court has agreed to hear emergency appeals by the Administration, disputing attempts by picayune district judges to issue nationwide injunctions against the Executive’s proper function of “faithfully executing the law.” Nationwide injunctions by junior courts and judges are an overreach and abuse of power of mindbogglingly large (yuuge) proportions. The proper jurisdiction of a district court is the persons and matters before them, IN THEIR DISTRICT, not the changing of national law – appealing an issue to the Supreme Court (or lobbying your congresscritter) is how you get bad law changed.

In the last few years, both Justice Clarence Thomas, and now Justice Neil Gorsuch, have expressed their belief that such abuses by lower courts needs to be constrained, and both seem to be looking for an appropriate test case to circumscribe the reach of district court judges permanently. (There is a nice article at law.com which quotes the two justices and lays out both sides of the argument. You can also read more about Justice Thomas’s prior opinions, on GraniteGrok.com.)

How bad is the picky picayune judge problem? Look at the numbers listed by Ted Cruz (via American Thinker):

“If you look at the facts of what’s happening with nationwide injunctions, I think it will explain why the DOJ has had to ask the Supreme Court to intervene over and over and over again.”
…..
“In the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, district courts issued a total of 12 universal injunctions against the Bush administration,” he said. “In the eight years of the Obama administration, district courts issued 19 universal injunctions against the Obama administration. In just three years of the Trump administration, we have already had 55 national universal injunctions issued against the federal government.”

From 1.5 per year to 18+ per year nationwide injunctions, and yet the ‘wise’ latina criticizes her Constitutionally minded colleagues for hearing appeals against such abuse. When you add in the number of times her rulings from the 2nd Circuit bench were reversed by the evenly balanced (some would say liberal leaning) Supreme Court of those days, one does wonder whether her advancement was entirely due to Affirmative Action. Nice job, Obama!