The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week about limits on the government's power to force COVID-related restrictions on Americans. Observers generally have a pretty good idea how a Supreme Court justice will come down on an issue by the questions he or she asks during oral arguments.
For example, based on her questions and comments last week, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor – who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama – looks to be all for expanding the government's power to impose masks, mandates, and the like. Talking about the omicron variant, she offered this:
Sotomayor: "We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators."
Here's the problem: that number is nowhere close to accurate. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, at the time there were about 5,000 children in hospital beds with any form of COVID. Curtis Houck of Media Research Center says even one of the most liberal newspapers in the country had to call her out, accusing Sotomayor of going "off the rails" with the comment.
"Well, it's really bad when the Washington Post fact checker, Glenn Kessler, has to give you four Pinocchios for lying about the number of children in the hospital with COVID – on ventilators, nonetheless," says the MRC spokesman.
Houck suspects Sotomayor lives in a liberal media bubble.
"For a side of the aisle that claims to care so much about misinformation, one of 'their own' justices sure seems to be peddling the misinformation they should be concerned about," he tells AFN.
"I think they should want to police their own house first, whether it comes to discipline with CNN personal problems or people at the Supreme Court not getting correct information from their side of the aisle. I think they've got some work to do."
The Epoch Times' Roger Simon describes Sotomayor's remark as "ludicrous" and argues that, at a minimum, she should recuse herself from all decisions regarding COVID.
"She won't," he writes. "The American left – straight up to SCOTUS justices apparently – is suffused with a belief that everything they say is automatically correct, [that] whatever they think ought to be true is true."
And regarding the associate justice's remark, Simon wonders: "How could such an ill-informed person be a justice of our highest court? What else doesn't she know – or, perhaps more exactly, doesn't want to know?"
