The Supreme Court of the United States has come under fire a lot recently. Many people believe it’s become just another political branch of government and of course there is the leaked draft opinion that signaled that the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s been a month and a half and we still don’t know who leaked it.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, however, believes that the Court can regain the trust of the American people. She recently spoke to the American Constitution Society, a liberal legal group led by former Senator Russ Feingold and while there said, “Institutions are made up by humans. Because we are human, by necessity we make mistakes. It is the nature of the human enterprise,” reports The Daily Mail.
Justice Sotomayor is one of the more liberal leaning Justices, but she took time to praise Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the more conservative Justices. She said, “I suspect I have probably disagreed with him more than with any other Justice. And yet, Justice Thomas is the one Justice in the building who literally knows every employee’s name.” She added, “He is a man who cares deeply about the Court as an institution, about the people who work there.”
Justice Sotomayor admitted that she gets discouraged, but she knows we must all continue to fight for what we believe in. She said, “[t]here are days I get discouraged, there are moments where I am deeply disappointed. Every time I do that, I lick my wounds for a while, sometimes I cry, and then I say: “Let’s fight.”‘ She was particularly speaking about lawyers on the left who ask why they should have hope.
She knows that some fights can take a very long time, even decades or longer, but change happens when people keep fighting. “Dred Scott lost his 11-year battle for freedom in the courts. … Yet he won the war. So that’s why I think we have to have continuing faith in the court system, in our system of government, in our ability … I hope not through war … towards continuing the battle each day to regain the public’s confidence.” “It took almost a century for the court to undo the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared that the U.S. Constitution did not apply to enslaved Black people,” reports The Daily Mail.
While America waits for the Court to release its decision in the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Sotomayor is trying to convince Americans that we can still trust the Supreme Court. She speaks of a friendship with a man who she disagrees with on most everything, she says. Do you think one of the things she has cried about is what is about to happen to abortion rights in America?
