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.
What I said in a second post. There are only a few "reliable" conservative justices. Thomas is rock solid in his jurisprudence. Alito is solid. Gorusch has some idiosyncracies, but he's pretty solid. Scalia was just about as perfect a justice as I could ask for.
Roberts? Kavanaugh? Barrett? Well..
Kenndy and O'Connor used to be known as a swing justices, who could, and often were, swayed by counter arguments.
A really solid, intellectual, and persuasive leftwing justice could easily make a habit of picking off Roberts, convincing Kavanaugh to go along with something, etc. We've seen this happen. Kagan DOES try this with Roberts.
Kagan's probably is that she's got to represent the intellectual left, while tempering two justices who are not intellectual and who are not interested in meeting with the other side of the bench.
Sotomayor and Ketanji are shitty justices. They're also not going to convince anyone who is balancing on the edge of an issue. This is one case where, imho, it's better to have firebrand idiots.
You know, there is some merit to this. Thanks for the re-explanation.
On the other hand, I fear that it's not that the three "conservative" justices you mention often need "picking off", but that they often arrive at their activist/non-originalist opinions on their own.
Isn't it amazing how it never seems like anyone the left manages to get seated ends up having more originalist opinions, but that we are often in the situation that the opposite happens?
It's hard to make any reading of Bostock without concluding he's a raging moron who wears a normal person skinsuit most days of the week.