Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is taking the high road regarding Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stating he is already part of the “Supreme Court family,” despite the intense criticism her liberal supporters have lathered upon him.
Appearing on CNN with David Axelrod, Sotomayor noted that the court adjusted very quickly to the addition of Kavanaugh to their bench, CNN reported.
“When you’re charged with working together for most of the remainder of your life, you have to create a relationship,” Sotomayor told Axelrod during an interview that will air Saturday evening.
“The nine of us are now a family, and we’re a family with each of us our own burdens and our own obligations to others, but this is our work family, and it’s just as important as our personal family,” the 2009-confirmed justice said.
“We’ve probably spent more time with each other than most justices spend, who have spouses, with their spouses,” she added.
Brett Kavanaugh faced the most brutal confirmation process in history, as Democrat operatives threw a long list of false sexual assault accusations at him in an effort to embarrass President Trump into pulling his nomination.
But once the process was finally over and Kavanaugh had been confirmed by a narrow vote, Sotomayor said she and the other seven Supreme Court justices welcomed their newest colleague with open arms.
“It was Justice (Clarence) Thomas who tells me that when he first came to the Court, another justice approached him and said, ‘I judge you by what you do here. Welcome.’ And I repeated that story to Justice Kavanaugh when I first greeted him here,” Sotomayor told Axelrod.
The Obama appointee to the highest court in the land also refused to accept the claim that the court now “tilts right” because of Kavanaugh’s addition.
“Conservative, liberal, those are political terms,” Sotomayor insisted. “Do I suspect that I might be dissenting a bit more? Possibly, but I still have two relatively new colleagues, one very new colleague, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. And we’ve agreed in quite a few cases, we’ve disagreed in a bunch, But you know, let’s see.”
Sotomayor concluded that the court cares when people are “injured” and denounced the current political climate for forgetting about “commonalities” and focusing on “superficial differences.”
“Those differences truly are not important,” she exclaimed. “What is important is those human values we share and those human feelings that we share. But I worry that we forget about that too often.”
Justice Kavanaugh made his first major public appearance since the left’s campaign to destroy him failed; he attended the Federalist Society’s annual convention dinner, where he received a standing ovation:
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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