The Attacks on Justice Sonia Sotomayor

The press quietly redefines the meaning of double standards.

As noted in my last entry, the liberal press (meaning essentially all of it) is in full throat against Justice Clarence Thomas. The complaint in essence is that Thomas (and his wife as well) accepted expensive gifts, travel and vacations from a wealthy Republican donor, Harlan Crow, and the Justice failed to report it on his financial disclosure forms. The outraged if implicit suggestion is that Thomas is corrupt — a suggestion oddly unaccompanied by even the allegation that Thomas voted on cases in which Crow had a stake, (which so far as I have been able to discover, he never did). Indeed, it’s unaccompanied by any claim that Thomas voted in a single case in a way inconsistent with the judicial philosophy he has had for decades. In other words, not only is there no evidence of an improperly influenced vote; there isn’t even an evidentiary basis for suspicion. Not that this has stopped the vitriol — it never has in the case of Justice Thomas.

Still, it was not a coincidence that this New York Post story caught my eye, “Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn’t recuse herself from cases involving publisher that paid her $3M: report.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn’t recuse herself from multiple cases involving a book publisher –  Penguin Random House – which paid her more than $3 million since 2010, according to a report. 

The copyright infringement cases, in which Penguin Random House stood to suffer financial damage if the court ruled unfavorably, were not taken up by the high court but justices voted on whether or not to hear the cases. 

Altogether, Sotomayor earned $3.6 million from Penguin Random House and its subsidiaries for agreeing to let them publish her 2013 memoir, “My Beloved World,” and numerous children’s books since then, the Daily Wire reported on Thursday. 

The same year that her memoir came out, Sotomayor voted on whether the high court should take up Aaron Greenspan v. Random House.

Her liberal colleague at the time, Justice Stephen Breyer, recused himself from the case, having also received money from Penguin Random House. 

Does this mean that Justice Sotomayor sold out? No. That she’s a crook? No. That Random House is actually her sugar daddy? No. It doesn’t mean any of that, which is all just a smear job.

Does it mean that she might have been better advised to step away from cases involving that publisher, or to have established a blind trust or something similar? Possibly. Evidently Justice Breyer thought so.

In 2020, Sotomayor also took part in deciding on a petition filed by fellow children’s author Jennie Nicassio, who argued that Penguin Random House was selling a book nearly identical to one she had already written and published. On the same day that the petition was delivered to the justices, Penguin Random House cut Sotomayor a check for $10,586, according to the Daily Wire. 

Again, Breyer recused himself from the case that the court declined to take up. 

Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, disclosed the income from her book publisher on her annual disclosure forms. 

It would take more bandwidth than readers would tolerate for me to list all the stories in the NYT, the Washington Post, and Slate; and the segments on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CNBC, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, et. al, ad infinitum that have breathlessly covered the Thomas story, all implying with greater or lesser degrees of emphasis that Justice Thomas is, at best, a sleaze.

How many of these outlets have covered the Sotomayor story, which, if anything, presents a far clearer case of potential conflict of interest and with far more money involved than anything now being said about Justice Thomas and Harlan Crow? Well, one of them. To its credit, CNN, in a piece published about 15 hours ago. It’s worth the read.

And the others?

Here is the coverage by the NYT:

Here is the coverage by the Washington Post:

Here is the coverage by Slate:

Here is the coverage on MSNBC:

Here is the coverage on PBS:

Here is the coverage on Bloomberg:

Here is the coverage on NPR:

I won’t go on. You get the idea.

What used to be known as journalism has been so debased by partisanship and left-wing bias that it has become unrecognizable. No wonder fewer and fewer people trust it — a swing even more pronounced than the overall and years-long erosion of trust in major institutions. It’s worse than unfortunate that this fact is now on such vivid display in the hatchet jobs being done on a man as generous and courageous as Clarence Thomas.