OPINION:
It ain’t easy being a “wise Latina.”
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wandered into the harsh world of facts last week during oral arguments over the constitutionality of President Biden using the power of the federal government to force citizens to take “vaccines,” which — factually speaking — do not, in fact, “vaccinate” people against catching a disease.
All caught up in her “lived experience” as a “wise Latina,” Justice Sotomayor used her perch on the high court to spread wild misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
“We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators,” she argued. “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”
Her math was off by more than 95,000 children — even according to the most hysterical fear-merchants inside the Biden administration. She was very close to 100% wrong. In polling terms, we call that a margin of error of plus or minus 95%.
Oh, well.
When Justice Sotomayor was auditioning for the Supremes, she famously had to answer for boasting to a group of students years earlier that she was a “wise Latina,” which somehow made her a better judge than some lousy white person.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she had told the group of law students in a speech.
During her confirmation hearings after she was inexplicably nominated to the highest court in the land, Justice Sotomayor was asked about the strange comment and whether she really believed that her skin color made her a wiser judge than someone with different skin color. (I cannot believe we are actually talking about this.)
She was trying to “inspire” the students, she explained. Indeed. History is littered with leaders who spewed racial division to “inspire” followers.
“I was also trying to inspire them to believe they could become anything they wanted to become — just as I have.”
Truly. Only in America.
You know you don’t have to go to law school to be on the Supreme Court. You don’t even have to be a lawyer. Nor, apparently, do you have to be very smart. Or wise.
As dumb, misinformed and unwise as Justice Sotomayor was last week arguing about all the phantom children hooked up to phantom ventilators, that wasn’t even the dumbest thing she said during the oral arguments. And let’s set aside out of charity her obvious ignorance about the capacity of hospitals and current use of ventilators for treating COVID-19.
Her larger argument was even stranger. And dumber.
In her fevered madness to see all American citizens injected with non-vaccine “vaccines,” Justice Sotomayor urged the Biden administration to treat citizens more like smokestacks than humans.
This is not a joke. She actually said this.
She was wearing a black robe. From the bench. On the high court. During a pandemic in which our government leaders are supposed to be thinking.
Since Mr. Biden is using the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to jab innocent citizens, Justice Sotomayor argued, why not just regulate these human workers the same way OSHA regulates other aspects of factory machinery?
“Why is the human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus?” she wondered.
Just when you thought things could not get any dumber, here comes Politico, a political tip-sheet website that breathlessly reports on the annual birthdays of all the geniuses who are running your federal government.
After canoodling with the Biden administration from the bench over OSHA mandates, Politico reported that Justice Sotomayor was “spotted” dining out with a bunch of top Democrat lawmakers at a fancy restaurant in Washington — maskless, no less! Spewing viruslike a broken down unscrubbed smokestack.
Only, it turned out; it was not Justice Sotomayor at all. Simply someone who looked like the wise Latina.
It was, after all, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s long-suffering wife who had been mistaken for Justice Sotomayor.
“Our tipster got it wrong,” Politico reported, “but we should have double-checked. We deeply regret the error.”
I bet its stupid “tipster” was white.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
