Hey Jeff Sessions...have you read this editorial? Hey John Cornyn, check this out. Is Sonia Sotomayor worse than Justice Souter on life issues? Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president and chief executive officer of Americans United for Life (AUL) says you better believe it. Read a portion of her editoriaL below. The full link is here.
When President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, the conventional wisdom was that she would be an apt replacement for retiring Justice David H. Souter, maintaining the high court's "balance" -- or, more accurately, its lopsided liberal tilt.
But Team Obama knows something most Americans don't. When it comes to the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade and the abortion cases that have since made it to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor is no Souter. Rather, her record shows that for the overwhelming majority of Americans who support at least some restrictions on abortion, she is worse than Justice Souter -- reading a "fundamental right" to abortion into the Constitution.
On the basic issue of whether Roe v. Wade is settled precedent, Justice Souter is a reliable vote for the high court's liberal wing. He has refused to take the opportunity, in cases such as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to re-examine the judicial basis for permitting legal abortion. But when it comes to common-sense restrictions on abortion, Justice Souter has voted repeatedly to uphold laws such as informed consent and parental notification -- which polls show are supported by at least 70 percent of the American public.
Not so Justice Sotomayor, whose activism before becoming a federal judge reveals strong and consistent opposition to common-sense regulations. From 1980 to 1992, she was a governing board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) where, according to the New York Times, she "was an involved and ardent supporter of their various legal efforts."
Those efforts included no less than six briefs in five abortion-related cases before the Supreme Court -- pushing aggressively for an interpretation of abortion rights that would eliminate most or all state and federal abortion regulations while requiring state and federal funding of abortion. In two of those cases, Rust v. Sullivan (1991) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the PRLDEF's briefs took positions more extreme than those of Justice Souter, who joined with the court's majority to uphold restrictions the fund wanted struck down.
Justice Sotomayor has never disavowed any of the PRLDEF's briefs, which are packed with the kind of extreme rhetoric more typical of left-wing blogs than of serious legal documents. They refer to unborn "lives" in derisive scare quotes and claim that minors seeking abortions need to be protected from parents' religious "indoctrination."