Court ruling should not be a Sotomayor strike

There are going to be people who will want to claim that Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States with regards to a case involving firefighters in Connecticut ought to be seen as evidence of Sonia Sotomayor’s unsuitability to sit on the high court.

That’s nonsense.

THIS CASE DOES provide a little bit of evidence that Sotomayor likely is not biased in favor of the social conservatives and their pet causes. But that is not what a justice on the Supreme Court is supposed to be about.

So the fact that a case in which she ruled while serving on the appeals court based in New York is just one part of her overall record. And it is on an issue upon which there is significant disagreement in this country.

There are many people who will believe that the high court “blew it” when they ruled Monday to strike down the ruling of lower courts in “Ricci vs. DeSteffano.” They will think it a shame that Sotomayor couldn’t have a say on the Supreme Court in this case, because they will see her viewpoint as being the appropriate one.

It also was one that was shared by four current members of the Supreme Court – which ruled 5-4 to strike down the lower court ruling.

NOT THAT IT would have mattered much.

One of the four justices who wanted to rule in favor of upholding the lower court rulings was soon-to-be-retired Justice David Souter. Which means that a high court with Sotomayor would have provided the same 5-4 ruling – or possibly 5-3, with Sotomayor abstaining from taking a position if she felt that her voting to uphold her own ruling would be seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

So what is at stake in this case that originated out of the fire department in New Haven, Conn.?

This relates to fire departments, which regardless of where in the United States they are located seem to have histories of problems when it comes to finding firefighters who are not Anglo in racial origin.

IN NEW HAVEN, the written examination for promotions to lieutenant or captain were given in 2003. When the results (which determined which firefighters actually had a chance at promotion) came back, it struck local officials that a disproportionate share of the people with good test results were white – 17, to be exact, with two others being Latino.

It really seemed to them that there weren’t enough African-American people who did well enough on the test to be seriously considered for promotion.

So New Haven officials tried to disregard the test results, and the end result is that no one in the New Haven Fire Department got promoted to a higher rank during the next two years.

That caused some of the white firefighters (and a few Latino ones as well) to sue, claiming they were denied a chance at promotion to a higher rank – which within agencies such as fire and police departments is all-important.

SOTOMAYOR WAS PART of an appeals court panel that rejected their lawsuit. That rejection is what ultimately was overturned on Monday.

It does strike me as somewhat contradictory that some Latino firefighters were affected negatively by Sotomayor’s ruling – but only in the sense that the Sotomayor critics would have us believe that her presence on the Supreme Court would result in a slew of rulings that would benefit Latinos at the expense of everybody else.

Could it be that Sotomayor didn’t have some ethnic agenda in mind when she made her ruling on this case?

What it ultimately comes down to is a matter of how legitimate are the written tests that are used by these public safety government agencies (which ultimately is what a fire department is) in determining who is best qualified for a promotion.

I HAVE ALWAYS been skeptical that a written examination of any type really tells us anything about how someone will react in an emergency situation. I feel the same way about college entrance examinations (and this comes from someone who managed to score well on my first and only try).

So the idea that someone might perceive the test results to be somehow flawed because so many of the people who did poorly were of a particular group seems logical. It basically was the point that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made in her written dissent.

The “spirit of the law” with regards to such promotions is that there is not supposed to be any factor used that would hold back anyone’s chances. Everybody is supposed to be equal, in theory.

So if one believes that the test results don’t mean much, then it is not ridiculous to think that they should be downplayed.

IT WOULD APPEAR to me that the people who are so concerned about upholding the sanctity of these test results are the ones who want to maintain an old standard of determining just who advances within a fire department.

And if it means that Sotomayor is trying to oppose that idea, then this bit of her record is probably all the more reason she ought to be confirmed quickly to a Supreme Court seat.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Read all about it! High Court votes largely along partisan lines to (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1428.pdf) strike down Sotomayor ruling on firefighters.