Speaking at KU School of Law, Justice Sotomayor embarrasses the high court | Opinion
It isn’t news when a liberal in a college town sneers that conservatives are too rich and insular to understand the struggles of the poor. From my experience, it’s news when a day goes by and that doesn’t happen.
But it is news when the pompous liberal making the tired old charge is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaking at the University of Kansas. She referred to one of Brett Kavanaugh’s opinions as coming “from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
And it is even more news when Sotomayor makes a public apology for spewing the hackneyed personal attack. “At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate,” the Barack Obama appointee said in a statement. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”
There are rumors that the comments Sotomayor apologized for are only one of the overly personal attacks she made about Supreme Court colleagues, but I couldn’t confirm that. Usually, such law school speeches are chummy, private and off the record. The law school’s spokeswoman did not return two calls seeking a transcript or video of the speech.
The fracas comes at a time when personal attacks are a subject of debate in the Kansas Legislature, where Republicans are using once-obscure parliamentary rules against questioning legislators’ motives for advancing legislation to silence and disrupt Democratic disagreement with the Republican supermajority’s actions.
As the Kansas Reflector reported:
“The tension between voting rights lobbyist Melissa Stiehler and a committee of Kansas legislators boiled over when Stiehler told them ‘lawmaking based on xenophobic propaganda is morally disgusting.’ A few Republicans shared glances, and (state) Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican, asked Stiehler to repeat herself. When she did, Williams reprimanded her and read from her laptop screen: “We may not impugn or question the motives, integrity, or good faith of its committee members. We should do so with respect, and if it is not, then it is considered out of order.”
The committee’s vice chair later told Stiehler in an email that she should “know when to shut up.”
It seems to me that Democrats and witnesses who support their point of view in the Legislature should have every right to attack their Republican colleagues even if it breaks decorum and is impolite. This is politics at its closest to the people and the public should have all the arguments at their disposal in order to judge how their legislators are doing and whether the laws they are passing are appropriate.
At the same time, what Democratic appointee Sotomayor did was a serious breach because her role isn’t a political one. She and her colleagues are supposed to be above politics, focused just on the law and the Constitution. They are supposed to call balls and strikes when disputes come before them. We all know they have political views, but what they are doing isn’t supposed to take that into account.
When a legislator calls another legislator names or suggests he doesn’t know anyone who is poor, that’s just the political rough and tumble of politics, which has featured name-calling of the very worst kind from the very beginning. Thomas Jefferson was accused in one of his presidential races of having carnal proclivities for the four-legged residents of his barn.
Our Supreme Court, with nine members who serve for life, is supposed to aspire to something better, something higher, something less feral. Let’s hope Sotomayor and her colleagues can keep it together. They are the last branch of the federal government whose behavior doesn’t look like it belongs on a farm.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published April 17, 2026 at 1:32 PM.
