Sotomayor is legitimately stupid and unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. She's an intellectual lightweight similar to, but not as bad as, Kamala Harris.
At oral argument, Sotomayor confused the difference between "de jure" [mandated by law] and "de facto" [existing in fact irrespective of the law] segregation.
She said "we certainly have de jure segregation. Races are treated very differently in our society in terms of their access to opportunity."
So she's wrong in two ways there. First, she means discrimination, not segregation. Second, she described de facto discrimination - which does exist and is called affirmative action - not de jure, as it isn't imposed by law. Though we all know she doesn't see affirmative action as discrimination, so she must have meant this nebulous and fictional "systemic racism" the libs always claim exists without ever being able to prove with evidence apart from "well black people do worse so that must be because of racism", when the true cause is inferior black choices and priorities.
Alito then asked "Are you aware of de jure segregation today?" knowing the lawyer would answer "I am not" because it's obvious to everyone except Sotomayor.
Rather than realize her error and take the L, Sotomayor immediately responded by doubling down: she claimed that "large swaths" of the US has "residential segregation" [nope], and that "large numbers" of schools or school districts only have one race [again, no and that would be illegal, with a handful of exceptions for black-only schools]. She then claimed "De jure to me means places are segregated. The causes may be different, but places are segregated in our country."
This is the classic "I'm not wrong, I just define the words in my own way" tactic redditors often use to transform any argument into an "unwinnable" semantic argument. In other words, it's a retard tactic. De jure literally means imposed by law. She argued [wrongly] de facto, and then called it de jure.
I know, I've heard her opinions before, it is amazing how she got where she is.
I guess this is the fail of the communist ideology, you push people in to positions do to ideology and not merit - race and gender is just a smokescreen to protect against criticism. That is one of the reasons why communist failed, you had very dumb people in positions where they had to resolve things. Just like we are seeing today, the communist approach to fix things was to not allow anyone to critique their bad decisions.
This works great to assume power but horrible for running a successful society.
No, it's not. She got there the same way all these sorts of people get where they are. The left does its politicking to boost them to positions of power, and (this is the important part) the media never shines a spotlight on the bullshit going on, and (in a lot of cases) actually covers for them. Look back at the last couple of Supreme Court Justice confirmations, and think about how those played out in the media. Nominees from the right face weeks of negative coverage, in which the left is allowed to grandstand, and basically viscously lie as much as they want. Nominees from the left get glowing reviews, and are allowed to give non-answer after non-answer to any questions senators on the right submit, without so much as a peep from the media.
People really need to start getting this. The media - the control of information, and the narrative - is the #1 fucking problem. Control of the narrative means control of the populace. When one side can pretty much hide (with few exceptions) whatever they want, and make people angry at their opponents whenever they want, our system of government totally breaks down. Do you think people from the left, or people in the middle are ever going to see anything regarding what this post is about? Do you really think any of those people are ever going to hear about how fucking pitiful it is that she put her ignorance of those basic legal terms on display, and how poorly that reflects on the process that allowed her to rise to the highest level of the judiciary?
This is the system in which we exist, and it's the exact system that allows someone like Sotomayor to rise to power, and stay there. For anyone not already firmly on the right, the left gets to decide exactly what people see/hear about Sotomayor. They get to craft exactly what sort of opinion people have about her.
You'll never see anyone outside of Fox run a bad segment about her. You'll never see any newspaper write a bad story about her. Go to Google right now. Just type in Sotomayor, and check the (curated) results you get about her. Look at the overall results, and then click the "news" tab.
That last one is the scariest to me. Google is a monster. Controlling Google, and getting to curate the results that nearly 100% of the populace uses to inform themselves on any given subject, is an unheard of level of control.
People more aligned with the right side, and people who are just unhappy with the current state of the world, really need to start understanding what the real issue is here. Politicians are always going to be slimy, and do things (ethical, and unethical) that align with their side's interests. That is to be expected. The system can survive that. What it can't survive is one side having carte blanche to do whatever it wants, because they control the populace's access to information.