WASHINGTON – A civil rights group on whose board Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor served filed racial bias lawsuits over employment examinations that resemble a Connecticut case in which she ruled against white firefighters, documents released by the Senate show.
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund represented Hispanic sanitation workers in New York City who wanted to stop white employees from getting promotions because, they argued, the qualifying exam unfairly disadvantaged minorities. The case unfolded as Sotomayor chaired the organization’s board of directors’ litigation committee.
The New York case bears strong similarities to a much-discussed lawsuit Sotomayor ruled on last year as a federal appeals court judge, which involved the reverse discrimination claims of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn. They sued after the city threw out its promotion test because too few minorities passed. The judicial panel she joined ruled against the white firefighters in the case, Ricci v. DeStefano - a ruling the Supreme Court reversed last Monday.
The sanitation workers’ case and similar ones that include a series of lawsuits against the New York City Police Department are detailed in hundreds of pages of new material the Senate Judiciary Committee put on its Web site Friday after receiving them from the Puerto Rican civil rights group.
The job discrimination suits have drawn outrage from Republicans who allege they prove Sotomayor has endorsed an agenda of reverse discrimination and racial preferences for minorities.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary panel, said this week that the Puerto Rican defense group has taken “extreme positions,” and his office branded the organization “activist” in a background memo it released on Friday. His aides had accused Sotomayor’s allies of withholding the documents to prevent a thorough investigation of her past before confirmation hearings begin July 13.
The materials give little insight into Sotomayor’s role in the organization’s activities, even while she chaired the board’s litigation committee. They do suggest, however, that Sotomayor and other board members were involved in making sure the cases PRLDEF handled were in keeping with its mission statement and were having an impact, according to a memo she wrote in June 1987.
