AAQ: In an ideal world, judges wouldn’t have a “racial” or “ethnic” lens towards legal issues. Thats not the real world where at least 4 or 5 justices argue in favor of interpreting the constitution as it would have been when several of the original justices OWNED black people in servitude, indigenous people were viewed as subhuman savages, women were totally disenfranchised legally and economically, and both Asian and Hispanic populations were de minimis. The reality is that after 200+ years, judges appointed today from those historically unrepresented communities DO come to their jobs with both explicit and implict biases in their legal analysis and are not frozen into an “originalist” or “constructionist” approach to adjudiation.
Giving both Thomas and Sotomayor the benefit of the doubt, I I guess I’m coming at it from the perspective of Sotomayor as more representive of the perspective of the roughly 18% of our population with Hispanic roots than the 12-14% with Black roots.
I suspect we disagree on which of them is a better lawyer or a more intellectually gifted scholar but I’ll agree that neither is in the upper tier of Justices in recent history.
On the other hand, look at the recent candidates for POTUS and try to explain why our country is unable to find more gifted individuals to lead the nation.