New Fox News Op-ed: "Did Sotomayor Lie to Senators?"

This is how the new Fox News piece starts off.

"Is there anything the Senate or Congress can do if a nominee says one thing seated at that table and does something exactly the opposite once they [are on the Supreme Court]?" Senator Arlen Specter asked Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday. When Sotomayor promises her "fidelity" to the rule of law the Senators simply have to trust that she is telling them the truth. Unfortunately, there is significant evidence that Sotomayor has been less than honest in private meetings with the Senators.

This past Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported on a series of interviews it had done with Senators about their private meetings with Sotomayor. Incredibly, every one of Sotomayor's private statements to the Senators, as reported by The Journal, were not only false, but she should also have known that they were false when she made them. Each inaccurate statement to the Senators involved speeches the judge had given numerous times and that she had clearly reviewed before meeting with the members of the Judiciary Committee.

For instance, shortly after Sotomayor's nomination, her now infamous Berkeley law school speech began to receive public scrutiny. Understandably, many Senators asked her about her statement that: "a wise Latina woman with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white man."

Sotomayor apparently told Republican Senators in private meetings that those words were "inadvertent" and "inartful," -- implying that her statement was an accident. President Obama himself tried to explain this statement as just a one-time utterance that she would have worded differently if she had the chance to do it all over again.

But after these private meetings with Senators it was revealed that Sotomayor had used the equivalent phrases during at least seven different speeches over a period of a decade. It is one thing for Obama to explain this as an accidental, single occurrence; it is something quite different for Sotomayor, especially now that we know that she repeatedly made such statements. . . . .