Ricci vs. New Haven: Where's Red Sonia's Empathy?

There does indeed, as some pundits have noted, seem to be a double standard at work in the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.

For example, as one editorialist in the Wall Street Journal observed, Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer decried a Bush appellate nominee for being Catholic. But he finds no problem with Sotomayor's sharing, however notionally, that church affiliation.

But perhaps the more curious question is, in the Ricci case, where was Sotomayor's famous "wise Latina" empathy?

The lead plaintiff, in an interview on Fox News last week, explained that he expected a full review of the case from the Second Circuit's Appellate Court. Instead, Sotomayor's response was terse and lacking in any discussion of the case.

Yet, here we have a group of wronge firemen, some with meager means, scrounging money to fund their own tutoring for an exam, the passing of which would provide them with career advancement and better compensation.

What was really horrifying was, in the same broadcast, hearing the discussion of Supreme Court Justice Alito's explicit identification of the case's origin. That is, a New Haven black minister visited the city's mayor and threatened him with electoral defeat if he didn't overturn the exam results.

Alito called Sotomayor's and her colleagues' review of the case in error and completely missing the obvious racial aspect.

Hmmmm.....wronged blue collar union workers. A racist minister pressures a mayor to overturn fair exam results. Sounds tailor made for a heavy dollop of judicial empathy, doesn't it?

Unless, of course, the jurist is Sonia Sotomayor, and the plaintiffs are neither Hispanic, nor black.