With fear for our democracy

Before examining the specifics of her blistering dissent in Trump v. United States, in which the Supreme Court announced that presidents are immune from criminal liability for their official acts, there are three things you should know about Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

1. She is a lawyer. Lawyers are necessarily cautious, institutional creatures. Most of us have faith in “the system” trained into us to an astonishing degree, and by looking at democratic institutions so closely all the time, we tend to lose the ability to think critically about them. Those institutions created us and sustain us now, and most of us believe they are worth preserving. That’s true even of the more reckless in our profession, but Sotomayor is not one of those — she is diligent and fastidious, not given to hyperbole or exaggeration.
2. As liberal lawyers go, she is on the conservative side. Sure, she graduated from Yale, but the Ivy League is the Ivy League, and few Ivy Leaguers are even minimally tuned into leftist sensibilities for long after graduation. She started her career as a prosecutor, and has been a judge for over 30 years now. George H.W. Bush first put her on the district court bench in 1992, back when Republican presidents appointed people other than Federalist Society drones and deranged bloggers. She’s a boomer, and most boomers were raised on a force-fed diet of Cold War patriotism, a taste that never really gets out of one’s mouth. Throw in the fact that she was the daughter of laborers who grew up in a housing project, but still managed to become one of the smartest jurists alive, and you have a recipe for someone who believes deeply in the promise of America. I don’t mean this as a slight at all; I only mean that she is not radical by any standard (except perhaps in comparison with her demoniac co-workers on the high court).
3. Because of her background, as discussed in items 1 and 2 above, she has seen some real shit. Ivy Leaguer or not, anyone who’s been in the projects, in trial, and on the bench for as long as Justice Sotomayor likely knows the ingredients in every kind of sausage.

Only with these facts in mind can we fully appreciate the significance of Sotomayor’s dissent in Trump v. U.S., the latest installment in a series of democracy snuff films produced by the Supreme Court. In her nearly 60-page opinion, the Justice offers a sobering takedown of the majority’s bad reasoning. She quotes anti-democratic luminaries like Alexander Hamilton and Justice Joseph Story, as if to…