Sonia Sotomayor And Affirmative Action

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor once called herself "a product of affirmative action" whose standardized test scores were sub-par for the Ivy League institutions she attended. The remarks, made almost 25 years ago, were revealed in videos Judge Sotomayor recently submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee for review. 

Predictably, Pat Buchanan, former presidential candidate and chairman of The American Cause, an organization that recently defended the blatant racism of one of its employees, is not happy about the comments (or rather, he's giddy about the opportunity to exploit them.)  In response, Buchanan has written a column titled "Miss Affirmative Action 2009," suggesting that Sotomayor is "a fraud" who is too stupid to serve on the court:

What are grounds for rejecting Sonia Sotomayor?

No one has brought forth the slightest evidence she has the intellectual candlepower to sit on the Roberts court. By her own admission, Sotomayor is an "affirmative action baby."

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance -- No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of the Yale Law Review -- her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

Buchanan also ridiculed, once again, the fact that Sotomayor worked on her English during college by reading children's books. "How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of 'Chicken Little' and 'The Troll Under the Bridge'?" he wrote. The answer, of course, is by working tirelessly, even if it meant engaging in the potentially embarrassing exercise (for a Princeton student) of reading books written for kids.

But Buchanan resents Sotomayor's hard work and wants Senate Republicans to make her nomination a referendum on affirmative action, which he calls "bigotry against white males." In fact, he went so far as to say, "One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest." Honest? That's one way to describe it.    

Notably, Buchanan doesn't seem to take issue with other kinds of affirmative action -- like the family connections that got George W. Bush into Yale and Harvard or John McCain into the Naval Academy, despite their mediocrity in the classroom. Or how about this? Buchanan's alma mater, Georgetown University, didn't admit women to the College of Arts and Sciences until 1968. So, it turns out, Buchanan was also a recipient of "white male" preference when he entered college in the late 1950s. One wonders whether Buchanan questions his own "intellectual candlepower."

The truth is, Sotomayor justified Princeton's decision to accept her by outperforming her classmates. Then she did it all over again at Yale before distinguishing herself over a long career as a jurist. That's not really a convincing argument against affirmative action -- or Sotomayor's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court.