Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative Supreme Court colleagues of acting unethically on the bench and not understanding how American government works during a University of Oklahoma-Tulsa event Wednesday.
The senior justice reportedly claimed that conservative justices ignore the law’s meaning to advance outcomes they personally favor.
“When you’re on the Supreme Court, you’re thinking about what the law should be,” Sotomayor reportedly said. “If you’re reading our opinions, many of my colleagues are not worried about what the law was. What they’re thinking about is what the law should be.”
“SOME OF MY COLLEAGUES DON’T [UNDERSTAND OUR SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT] EITHER BY THE WAY, AND I’M NOT JOKING ABOUT THAT.”
According to local media, Sotomayor made the startling claim about her fellow justices while discussing the decline of civic education in America.
“My greatest fear is that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. They don’t understand what our system of government presumes,” Sotomayor said. “Some of my colleagues don’t either by the way, and I’m not joking about that.”
The Obama appointee singled out her disagreement with the unitary executive theory, which recognizes the president’s inherent Article II authority over the executive branch.
“That’s not what was created” by the Constitution, Sotomayor reportedly claimed. “We created a government with checks and balances, and the unitary executive theory is overturning that balance.”
Those issues were central to the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Slaughter decision earlier this year, in which the court upheld 6-3 President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission. The ruling overturned longstanding precedent that allowed Congress to limit a president’s authority to remove members of so-called “independent agencies.”
Sotomayor dissented.
Yet for all her concerns about justices ruling based on what they think the law should be instead of what it actually says, Sotomayor has done exactly that. Since joining the high court, the Obama appointee has regularly disregarded the law’s original meaning to advance outcomes that comport with her left-wing ideology.
In 2015, she signed onto the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which shoehorned so-called “gay marriage” into the Constitution — despite there being no sound basis for such a decision.
And in 2022, she dissented from the court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which invented an imaginary constitutional “right” to abortion out of thin air.
Wednesday’s remarks are hardly the first instance of Sotomayor using a public forum to attack her colleagues.
The Obama appointee notably took a shot at Justice Brett Kavanaugh at an event earlier this year over an immigration enforcement opinion he wrote.
“THIS IS FROM A MAN WHOSE PARENTS WERE PROFESSIONALS. AND PROBABLY DOESN’T REALLY KNOW ANY PERSON WHO WORKS BY THE HOUR.”
Sotomayor later issued a statement apologizing to Kavanaugh for her “hurtful” and “inappropriate” comments.
Sotomayor isn’t the only left-wing justice to lash out at conservative colleagues over disagreements in cases. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has become infamous for taking personal jabs at the court’s conservative majority.
While speaking at an event last year, the Biden appointee characterized the Supreme Court’s most recent rulings as an “existential threat to the rule of law.”
In an interim docket case involving the Trump administration last year, she accused the conservative justices of abandoning proper jurisprudence to bend over backward for the government.
She wrote: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. … Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
The Biden appointee more recently accused her colleagues of playing politics in a case involving race-based redistricting. The outburst prompted a stinging rebuke from Justice Samuel Alito, who said that Jackson’s “rhetoric … lacks restraint.”
In an interview last year, Sotomayor said she always tries to see the “good” in her fellow Supreme Court justices, even when they disagree.
