Latino professionals held to different standards

Supreme Court justices do their best to both remain apolitical in public and to get along with each other in private.

Steering clear of partisanship helps maintain the independence of the court, and keeping the peace is important because their lifetime appointments effectively make them a family.

This is why Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the case of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. Cook County, Illinois, was supposedly so exceptional.

The case entails the Trump administration’s so-called public charge rule, which will prohibit legal immigrants from obtaining green cards if the government has reason to believe that they are likely to rely on public aid, such as cash or food assistance.

Less publicized but equally vexing, the rule will make it harder for immigrant workers and international foreign students to extend or change their visas. It also makes it tougher for green card holders to reenter the U.S. if they’ve spent more than six months abroad.

In Sotomayor’s dissent — described as “scathing,” “blistering,” “sharp” and “furious” by mainstream media outlets - she somberly objected to the rule change.

But she didn’t object because of the dubious practice of subjecting potential new green card holders to far higher standards than past immigrants petitioning for legal permanent status. Nor because the new move reflects the carelessness with which President Trump treats immigrants generally. This is mere context. Sotomayor is sore over how the current Supreme Court has bowed to the Trump White House even in standard administrative matters with long-standing precedents.

“To justify upending the normal rules of appellate procedure, a party must also show a likelihood of irreparable harm,” Sotomayor wrote. “The government has not made that showing here . ... The government’s only claimed hardship is that it must enforce an existing interpretation of an immigration rule in one state — just as it has done for the past 20 years — while an updated version of the rule takes effect in the remaining 49.

The government has not quantified or explained any burdens that would arise from this state of the world.”

That’s pretty straightforward — and as boring an administrative stance as any careful observer of high court legal maneuverings can imagine.

But the smoking gun that caused headline writers to go bananas with their assertion that Sotomayor was “blistering” is the following:

“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow,” Sotomayor wrote.

“Perhaps most troublingly, the court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This court often permits executions — where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life — to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures ‘to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.’ Yet the court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the government in far less compelling circumstances — where the government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one state.

I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decisionmaking process that this court must strive to protect.”

Let’s be super clear here. Sotomayor cited administrative precedent, then made an on-the-record observation about how quickly the court moves when Trump says “jump,” to assert that the entire court is itself flirting with the appearance of partisanship.

That makes her “blistering” and “scathing”?

Further searching yielded an article on the right-leaning media watchdog site Accuracy in Media complaining that the mainstream press “failed to acknowledge how unusual it is for a sitting Supreme Court justice to accuse his or her colleagues of blatant partisanship.”

Framing Sotomayor’s measured dissent as “accusation” is itself a hysterical overreaction — one that illustrates how even heavy, sober legal language can become a Rorschach test for bias depending on who writes it.

It can be interpreted as steady or strongly worded when coming from a white male or “furious” — and other terms implying emotional loss of control — when written by women of color.

It’s a painful and bracing reminder that Latino professionals are held to far different standards than white ones. It’s unfair and totally fabricated bunk.