\n<\/p>\n
Showing why her own colleagues have long viewed her as the abrasive outlier of the High Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor \u2014 who said in 2001, \u201cI would hope that a <\/span>wise Latina woman<\/span> with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn\u2019t lived that life\u201d \u2014 <\/span>\u00a0recently decided that the hallowed traditions of Supreme Court protocol are secondary to her own progressive \u201clived experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking at the University of Kansas, the \u201cWise Latina\u201d took a verbal sledgehammer<\/a> to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, violating the unwritten rule that judicial disagreements stay within the mahogany walls of One First Street.<\/p>\n Sotomayor\u2019s target was a concurrence Kavanaugh wrote regarding an emergency order on immigration enforcement. While Kavanaugh noted that brief stops for legal residents are typically just that\u2014brief\u2014Sotomayor went for the jugular, and she made it personal. Mocking Kavanaugh\u2019s upbringing, she sneered, \u201cThis is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn\u2019t really know any person who works by the hour.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a stunningly low blow, even for Sotomayor. By attacking Kavanaugh\u2019s class and background rather than his legal reasoning, she didn\u2019t just breach collegiality; she set it on fire. Supreme Court protocol dictates that justices attack the argument<\/em>, not the\u00a0man<\/em>. But for Sotomayor, identity politics is the only North Star, even if it means suggesting a colleague is too \u201cprivileged\u201d to understand the plight of the working man.<\/p>\n Of course, this isn\u2019t Sotomayor\u2019s first time playing the role of the \u201cgrating\u201d colleague. Her history on the bench is littered with instances where her peers\u2014on both sides of the aisle\u2014have cringed at her antics. Even the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fellow traveler on the Left, was known to trade barbs<\/a> with Sotomayor in footnotes, frequently questioning her interpretation of the law.<\/p>\n In the\u00a0Schuette<\/em> case, Sotomayor\u2019s fifty-eight-page dissent was so vitriolic that Chief Justice John Roberts felt compelled to write a separate concurrence just to call her out for making legal disagreements personal. At the time, even The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>\u00a0admitted her voice was grating on her colleagues. Antonin Scalia was even less diplomatic, famously labeling her comparisons of certain modern policies to Jim Crow as \u201cshameful.\u201d<\/p>\n The Supreme Court relies on \u201cinstitutional glue\u201d\u2014the handshake, the shared meals, the omert\u00e0 of the conference room\u2014to function. Sotomayor, however, seems intent on dissolving that glue. While Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently noted<\/a> that collegiality is an \u201cact of the will,\u201d Sotomayor appears to have willed herself into a state of permanent grievance. By publicly slamming Kavanaugh\u2019s character, she has signaled that she is no longer interested in being a judge among peers, but rather an activist-in-exile, writing children\u2019s books and airing dirty laundry because she can\u2019t win the legal argument.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n