Pat Dollard

Tweet

American Thinker

By Jeffrey Folks

As more information becomes available, we are able to form a clearer impression of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She is an intelligent, well-educated individual with broad experience in both corporate and judicial law. According to the White House and to her own statements, she is a person whose “compelling life story” would make her a “better” or “wiser” justice than a white male. She is also a Federal Appeals Court judge with a 17-year history of rulings which, taken as a whole, place her on the left of judicial opinion spectrum in modern America.

These matters have been thoroughly discussed and digested in the media, and, predictably, liberals have come out in favor of her nomination (even those like Sen. Harry Reid, who admitted to never having read one of her rulings) while conservatives are lining up against it. But while pundits are deciding whether or not Ms Sotomayor is or is not a “racist” and whether her life story is or is not that “compelling” (was she really all that “underprivileged” or just pretending to have been so?), another issue has cropped up. What has Sonia Sotomayor done with all the money she has earned over the last 25 years?

Sotomayor’s annual earnings come to $196,000 a year ($170,000 a year as an appeals judge and $26,000 for part-time teaching). She has served as an appeals judge for 17 years. This service was preceded by lengthy tenure at a corporate law firm of Pavia and Harcourt, where she was a partner, and presumably was well compensated.

Yet after a career that has spanned 25 years, Ms Sotomayor only has one thousand dollars in net savings. As reported in the New York Post, Sotomayor’s bank account holds $31,985. Her credit cards debts are $15,823, and she has $15,000 in unpaid dental bills. That leaves her with $1,162. Sotomayor’s total assets, revealed as $708,068, consist almost entirely of equity in her Manhattan apartment. The judge’s financial filing does not disclose what percentage of this figure is unrealized gain, but it must be sizable. In other words, other than home equity, Ms Sotomayor is essentially broke.

If confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, Ms Sotomayor will be ruling on numerous cases that involve investors, savers, corporate profits, business regulation, and related free-market issues. There is nothing in the rules that says that a justice on the United States Supreme Court must be an investor in the stock or bond market, or even that she must be financially solvent. But the fact that Ms Sotomayor, after so many years of highly paid professional work, has no savings or investments and no experience or apparent “empathy” with savers or investors, should be highly troubling to the tens of millions of Americans who do have investments, 401Ks, and personal savings.

Continued HERE