What I find interesting in this article is not that Sonia Sotomayor went gambling with her mother in Florida and won a $8,000 jackpot. What I find interesting is that she lives in a condo in Greenwich Village and that her only other assets are between $15,000-$65,000 in checking and savings accounts. She doesn’t list massive investments in Goldman Sachs or Intel or AIG. Her total annual income, which combines her check for being a judge with her check for teaching at Columbia University, is $205,000. That seems a fair but modest amount of income for someone of her academic achievements, but it is not enough for her to be impacted by Obama’s tax hike on America’s wealthiest individuals.
She doesn’t live in a multi-million parkside penthouse on the Upper East Side. She has a condo in the Village. If you’ve ever been to the Village you know that it marches to its own peculiar beat. It’s the center of gay life in New York City, but it is also pulsing with multicultural artistic creativity and an intellectualism that combines the legacy of the Beat Generation with the rigors of New York University’s curriculum. You cannot walk the streets of the Village and call it your home without understanding modern progressivism at its core.
As people pore over her court decisions looking for signs that she is a progressive or a corporatist, they’d do well to remind themselves of these other facts. Any ambitious jurist with aspirations to be a Supreme Court Justice knows that there is a line to walk. I feel comfortable that Sotomayor will represent modern progressivism on the Court.
