New Haven Firefighters Get Their Due by Tim Siggia

New Haven Firefighters Get Their Due

By Tim Siggia

July 01, 2009

"I would hope that a Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." -- Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court nominee

The Supreme Court recently made a landmark 5-4 decision that resulted in earned promotions for at least 10 New Haven firefighters, as well as a triple blow to the City of New Haven and its ultra-liberal mayor, John DeStefano, affirmative action policies, and the Quota Queen, a.k.a. Sonia Sotomayor, self-proclaimed poster girl for affirmative action and Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, to replace retiring justice David Souter. Ruling along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy once again providing the swing vote, the high court overturned a decision of the Second Appellate Court in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano which upheld a lower court's decision in favor of the City of New Haven, which had thrown out the results of an examination for the positions of captain and lieutenant in the New Haven Fire Department because no black applicants had qualified. That decision was made by a three-judge panel which included Sotomayor.

The ruling is significant for a number of reasons. First, and perhaps most important, it promotes those who by virtue of their examination scores earned promotion -- promotion which DeStefano tried to deny those applicants for reasons of political correctness. Second, it calls the whole concept of affirmative action into question, as it should have been long ago. The suit of Ricci v. DeStefano was filed on grounds of reverse discrimination, or, as I prefer to call it, counter-discrimination. Counter-discrimination is in fact what affirmative action is really all about. Race-based preferences and set-asides cannot be described otherwise, for they in fact do discriminate against whites. There simply isn't any other way to put it and still be honest. With an African-American president now occupying the White House, it seems many of the previous arguments for affirmative action are now being called into question. Perhaps most compelling is the fact that firefighters, by the nature of their work, are directly concerned with the public safety. Can there therefore be any justification for a "dumbed-down" qualification exam, the very idea of which should serve as an affront to intelligent blacks in any walk of life? One of the building blocks of affirmative action is the concept that the playing field has to be "leveled," so to speak, in order for blacks to compete. Were I black myself, I would take umbrage at such a notion, and I am personally acquainted with black people who in fact do resent this sort of patronizing.

My personal experience with affirmative action in the Navy and elsewhere has led me to the conclusion that it is a failed concept whose day is not only over, but never should have dawned in the first place. Well-intended though it may have been, affirmative action as I see it has done more to promote racism on both sides than to end it, and to polarize the races rather than bring them together. It should be scrapped, ended, done away with. Now.

The second reason this is important is perhaps not so obvious as the first, but nevertheless deserves our attention. It is the ideological split of the Supreme Court, the current makeup of which is four conservative justices, including the chief justice, four liberal justices, and one moderate justice, Kennedy, on whose opinions the final rulings are often made. President Obama's current nominee is one whose past rulings on this and other cases has shown her to be a firm believer in racial quotas, which tend to result in better-qualified whites being passed over in favor of lesser-qualified blacks and other minorities simply because they are minorities. Though she claims to be a firm believer in the rule of law, Judge Sotomayor has also made a number of statements like the one quoted above to suggest that she would knowingly allow her personal biases to affect her rulings, which they evidently did in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. Of the ten New Haven firefighters who were originally denied their earned promotions, two were Hispanic. One can only wonder how sympathetic they might be to the Quota Queen's decision in their case.

With his initial nomination, Barack Obama has left no doubt in anyone's mind about what kind of justices he wants to see on the Supreme Court. Conservatives always took it for granted that he would favor liberal, activist legislators-from-the-bench. The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is simply a case of suspicions confirmed in this regard. With Souter retiring, the best Obama can do at this time is replace one liberal justice with another. The next justice most likely to leave the bench would be 89-year-old John Paul Stevens, another liberal -- which puts Obama in an identical position with his next nomination. But if something unforeseen happens, and yet another justice either retires or dies during Obama's presidency, it could permanently alter the makeup of the Supreme Court altogether, and the implications for the future of the rule of law in this country could be very grave indeed.