Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor Read Online Free PDF

Justice Thomas’s well-known opposition to affirmative action and its stigma.
    With the pending case, Thomas believed that the University of Texas was not only discriminating against white and Asian applicants but also hurting minority students. After the oral arguments, his law clerks gathered statistics that showed that blacks and Hispanics admitted to the university based on race were less prepared than their white and Asian classmates. They found that in the university’s entering class of 2009, beyond the separate top 10 percent group, blacks scored at the 52nd percentile of 2009 SAT takers nationwide, while Asians scored at the 93rd percentile. Blacks had a mean GPA of 2.57 and a mean SAT score of 1524 (out of a possible score of 2400); Hispanics had a mean GPA of 2.83 and a mean SAT score of 1794; whites had a mean GPA of 3.04 and a mean SAT score of 1914; and Asians had a mean GPA of 3.07 and a mean SAT score of 1991. 15
    Such statistics made Sotomayor shudder. She rejected the notion that people could be seriously measured by scores. She believed that minorities from disadvantaged situations could catch up with nurturing and academic support on campus.
    In an interview related to the promotion of My Beloved World , she told NPR reporter Nina Totenberg, “As much as I know Clarence, admire him and have grown to appreciate him, I have never focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive. And I know one thing: If affirmative action opened the doors for me at Princeton, once I got in, I did the work. I proved myself worthy. So, I don’t look at how the door opened.” 16
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    At the Supreme Court, as the anticipation intensified over how Sotomayor, Thomas, and the other justices were resolving the University of Texas case, the Court took up an equally polarizing dispute over the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Hanging in the balance was a provision, known as Section 5, requiring states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before making any change in their electoral rules.
    It was a coincidence that the two cases arrived at the Court at the same time, but together the disputes heightened liberals’ fears that the Roberts Court was poised to roll back protections for racial and ethnic minorities.
    The iconic Voting Rights Act prohibited poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that historically had prevented blacks and Latinos from voting. Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson had won congressional passage of the law only after the “Bloody Sunday” episode on March 7, 1965, when state troopers clubbed and gassed peaceful civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
    Unlike other parts of the Voting Rights Act that targeted intentional discrimination once it happened, Section 5 sought to head off any disenfranchisement of minorities preventively with the preclearance requirement. The provision, historically covering states in the Old South, had been designed to be temporary but had been repeatedly reauthorized by strong bipartisan majorities in Congress. The version of the law before the justices in 2013, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, covered nine states entirely—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—and parts of seven others.
    That 2006 reauthorization had earlier been tested at the Supreme Court, but the justices punted in the case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder . 17 The Supreme Court said that the small water district near Austin that challenged the preclearance rule was eligible for an exemption, so there was no need to access the constitutional validity of the law. Still, in one of the most powerful passages of that 2009 opinion, Chief Justice Roberts declared that “things have changed in the South” and suggested that a majority might be ready to roll back the long-standing protections of Section 5 in the next