On Campaign Finance Board, Sotomayor Balked at Overstepping Law

As Judge Sonia Sotomayor prepares for the second day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a new document is being circulated as one that foreshadows her future injection into the debate over so-called “judicial activism.”

On Dec. 11, 1991, at a meeting of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she was a member from 1988 until she became a federal judge in 1992, Ms. Sotomayor objected to interpreting laws in a way that would alter the plain meaning of the text written by lawmakers – even if doing so would be an improvement on policy grounds.

Ms. Sotomayor made her remarks in response to a complaint by Carolyn Maloney, who at that time was a City Council member and who now is a Democratic congresswoman, over a board advisory opinion that said that expenditures by a political party did not count toward individual candidates’ spending limits under the city’s election financing law.

Ms. Maloney said that the board’s interpretation was “wrong” because it would allow “the political machines to ride roughshod over our good government efforts to limit campaign spending.” She said she was introducing legislation to override the advisory opinion, but also urged the board to “correct it” on its own.

Ms. Sotomayor replied:

I assume in any situation in which there is a board, or even judges, that the people who write the laws are going to disagree with the way we interpret them. I hope that you don’t take our decision with respect to the political party spending as being an endorsement of that concept, meaning that’s the way we, as a board, believe it should be.

Our decision was based on what we thought the law said. Not on what we thought would be right in the law. That question we leave to the Council to decide and if it changes it, so be it. That is their prerogative as legislators to change that if they disagree, but we wanted to make sure that the Council understands our decision was not based on what we think the law should be, but only what we thought the law said as it exists.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board provided the minutes from that meeting and several others to The New York Times on Monday. The paper had earlier requested all such documents related to Judge Sotomayor’s tenure at the agency, and most were provided weeks ago. A board staff member notified The Times on Monday that it had located the additional minutes and provided them to the newspaper.

Since her Supreme Court nomination, Judge Sotomayor’s conservative critics have frequently accused her of being an “activist” who “legislates from the bench.” Here is an article that examines the evidence supporting such claims.

In addition, The Times analyzed a set of Campaign Finance Board minutes that was previously unearthed as part of this story about Judge Sotomayor’s record on election financing regulations.

Source: hecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com