In an unguarded moment Monday, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia occasionally made her so angry that she would have beaten him with a baseball bat if she could have.
During a Q&A session at the University of Minnesota with some 2,700 people present, Sotomayor admitted that Scalia’s opinions sometimes infuriated her.
“There are things he’s said on the bench,” Sotomayor told the room full of lawyers and students, “where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it.”
Slate LGBT commentator Mark Stern suggested that Sotomayor’s baseball bat comment probably referred to Scalia’s remarks during arguments in a recent affirmative action case.
Stern’s hypothesis gains plausibility in the light of a number of scathing opinions that emerged following President Obama’s choice of Sotomayor for the high court in 2010, where pundits accused Obama of “dumbing down” the court with the appointment of a less-than-qualified lawyer who was herself the product of “affirmative action.”
Writing for CNN, Ilya Shapiro said that in his choice of Sonia Sotomayor, “President Obama has confirmed that identity politics matter to him more than merit. While Judge Sotomayor exemplifies the American Dream, she would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic.”
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