The U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court today in a 68-31 vote. As expected, the Senators voted along party lines, with all Senate Democrats and only nine Republicans voting to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee. The final step in Sotomayor’s road to the Supreme Court will be a White House swearing-in ceremony, which reportedly could take place as early as this week.
Sotomayor will become the 111th Supreme Court justice and will join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the current Supreme Court. In the history of the Court, she will be the third female justice and the first Hispanic justice.
During Sotomayor’s career as both a trial and an appellate judge, she was involved in several notable cases. Most recently, she participated in a very high-profile discrimination case — Ricci v. DeStefano. In this case, she affirmed the city of New Haven, Connecticut’s decision to throw out tests that were used to evaluate firefighter candidates for promotion since minority candidates scored disproportionately lower on the test. White firefighters who received high scores on the test and were denied promotion sued New Haven, asserting that they were victims of reverse discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned her decision in a 5-4 vote, ruling in favor of the white firefighters.
Since Sotomayor has said that her ethnicity and gender are important factors in serving on the bench, her confirmation will fulfill Obama’s stated aspiration to add diversity to the Supreme Court. However, Sotomayor has taken heat from critics about statements she has made suggesting that her background and heritage help guide her judicial decision making. For example, in a 2001 speech at UC Berkeley, she stated, “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.” Sotomayor’s critics have used such statements to suggest that she is a “judicial activist.”
Since Justice David Souter was considered one of the “liberal” justices, it has been speculated that the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor likely wouldn’t shift the overall balance of the Court.