They are at it again, the supposed party tolerance, Democrat backers of Sotomayor are urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the "troubled and litigious work history" of firefighter Frank Ricci.
McClatchydc reports:
On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci’s troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters’ attention to Ricci’s past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he’s dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised.
The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci’s retaliation complaint.
Frank Ricci has some 17 years of fire department service and has a history of overcoming dyslexia, including having to hire tutors to study for the test that he would have to pass to get his promotion, and has been sighted with awards for bravery.
So what is the crime of Frank Ricci that has Democrats on the attack one might ask, he dared to exercise his constitutional rights by taking the city that discriminated against him based on his race by preventing his promotion due to the fact that no black firefighters passed the tests and only one Hispanic passed it.
The article continues:
The 35-year-old Ricci was the lead plaintiff in the case Ricci v. DeStefano, challenging New Haven’s refusal to promote white firefighters after African-American and all but one Hispanic firefighters failed to score high enough on a promotion exam.
Sotomayor and a majority of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the city’s claim that it was justifiably concerned about a potential civil rights suit being filed by the African-American firefighters.
"Sotomayor and her panel colleagues were bound by long-standing precedent and federal law," People for the American Way executive vice president Marge Baker said in a June statement. "They applied the law without regard to their personal views."
Last month, however, the Supreme Court overturned the 2nd Circuit by 5-4.
"Once . . . employers have made clear their selection criteria, they may not then invalidate the test results, thus upsetting an employee’s legitimate expectation not to be judged on the basis of race," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
The bottom line, as I mentioned before, is that to say that it is OK to discriminate against white fire fighters by preventing their promotions until the City can develop a test that black people can pass is totally absurd and flies in the face of the very constitution she was sworn to uphold.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned her ruling it sheds more light onto Sotomayor views as it relates to race, She has been found to have made the following statements in more than 6 speeches (each vary slightly, but they all make the same point, I’m only providing one for an example):
Here is what she said in her 1994 speech:
“Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that “a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion in dueling cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes the line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, if Prof. Martha Minnow is correct, there can never be a universal definition of ‘wise.’ Second, I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.”
Given these statements that clearly indicate a notion that she views her abilities as superior to white males because she is a Latina woman and the recent ruling on the Ricci case, it seems obvious now, that the Democrats are getting nervous and have decided that they need a distraction and are going to seek to demonize and discredit Frank Ricci who the Supreme Court ruled was a victim of discrimination, who’s only crime was to seek justice, and for that, the Democrats are going to pay him back dearly.
Going after Frank Ricci is clearly a new low in the politics of personal destruction, but then again, what else would you expect from the left?
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