Rush Limbaugh called Sonia Sotomayor a racist today and said he hopes she fails to win confirmation.
“So, here you have a racist,” Limbaugh said on his show today. “You might want to soften that and you might wanna say a reverse racist… She is an affirmative action case extraordinaire and she has put down white men in favor of Latina women.”
Limbaugh seems to be referring to a speech Sotomayor gave in 2002 about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said at the time.
Sotomayor has also ruled to uphold an affirmative action policy in which the city of New Haven gave firefighting positions to minority candidates who scored lower than white candidates on a qualifying exam.
“I mean, do I want her to fail? Yeah,” Limbaugh said. “Do I want her to fail to get on the court? Yeah, she’d be a disaster on the court. Do I still want Obama to fail as president? Yeah–AP, you gettin’ this? He’s gonna fail anyway but the sooner the better so as little damage can be done to the country.”