Sotomayor Under Fire for Discrimination Case

July 16, 2009— -- Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor might be off the hot seat as her confirmation hearings wind to a close, but one firefighter today offered a parting shot when he alleged the government and legal system -- namely an appeals panel that included Sotomayor -- "didn't care" about his discrimination case.

Ben Vargas, a Hispanic New Haven, Conn., firefighter joined a group of white firefighters in a lawsuit against the city, Ricci v. DeStefano, claiming the city had discriminated against them by not granting them promotions when it threw out promotion tests because black firefighters didn't perform well on them.

Sotomayor and a lower court panel ruled that the firefighters were not unfairly denied promotions, but the Supreme Court last month reversed that decision.

"The focus should not have been on me being Hispanic," said Vargas. "The focus should have been on what I did to earn a promotion to captain, and how my own government and some courts responded to that. In short they didn't care."

"I think it important for you to know what I did, that I played by the rules and then endured a long process of asking the courts to endorse those rules," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In questioning earlier in the day, Republican senators including John Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina both pressed Sotomayor on the Ricci v. Stefano decision.

Sotomayor today told the lawmakers that the panel's decision needs to be placed "back in context," saying that the issue at hand in the case was whether "a member of a disparately impacted group had a right under existing precedent to bring a lawsuit."

She explained during earlier exchanges this week that it was not an affirmative action case, and that the issue at hand was very narrow.

But Graham said that in the Ricci case, "you missed one of the biggest issues in the country, or you took a pass."