An Experiment in Scotch

As most peo­ple know, Pres­i­dent Obama recently tapped Sonia Sotomayer to be the next Supreme Court Jus­tice. There’s been quite a bit of dis­cus­sion regard­ing her legal the­o­ries, recent com­ments on white men and Latina women and her over­all abil­ity to do the job. I per­son­ally doubt that she is ter­ri­bly dan­ger­ous even though she prob­a­bly would vote for things I dis­ap­prove of (Roe v Wade and gun con­trol). She doesn’t strike me as a light­ning rod of pro­gres­sive, Liv­ing Con­sti­tu­tion types and so, over­all, she’s not too scary to me and thus, not to inter­est­ing either.

How­ever, I ran across some­thing today that I do find inter­est­ing about her. Last week, she filed the required ques­tion­naire which hap­pens to include a fairly detailed descrip­tion of her finan­cial sit­u­a­tion. She makes approx­i­mately $175K a year and while she has a sub­stan­tial val­u­a­tion on an apart­ment she owns in NY, she appears to have no sub­stan­tial retire­ment sav­ings at all. She also has almost $16K in credit card bills and $15K in den­tal bills outstanding.

Look­ing at her sit­u­a­tion, it turns out that fed­eral judges can retire at age 55 and still get a pen­sion worth 85% of their work­ing salary adjusted for infla­tion plus free med­ical care for the entire fam­ily. So I sup­pose that isn’t sur­pris­ing that she hasn’t seen fit to save any­thing for retire­ment. $170K a year to be retired is noth­ing to sneeze at. Of course, that doesn’t explain the large amount of out­stand­ing, short term debt but we’ll let that slide. How­ever, fed­eral pen­sion notwith­stand­ing, what does this tell us about Judge Sotomayor? Could it be use­ful in deter­min­ing how she might rule on cases that come before her?

I think it clearly shows that she is a spender, not a saver. How might that affect how she rules? Well, right off the bat, we know she isn’t at all con­cerned with dis­as­ters or tragedies. Most finan­cial plan­ners say that you should have 6 months worth of expenses in an emer­gency sav­ings fund. It’s dif­fi­cult to tell what her expenses are but assum­ing she’s got an approx­i­mately $6000 monthly mort­gage pay­ment (based on the $381K mort­gage plus a 4% prop­erty tax which may be high since I’m sure the NY income tax makes up for the prop­erty taxes I’m used to here in Texas) plus another $4000 in var­i­ous expenses, she’s about $70K short in her cash fund. It’s not too great of a leap to believe that since she is unin­ter­ested in prepar­ing for a dis­as­ter and instead relies on the the good­will of the gov­ern­ment, she might also be sym­pa­thetic to peo­ple who are equally unin­ter­ested in being pre­pared when a dis­as­ter occurs in their life.

Again, it’s impor­tant to note that fed­eral judges aren’t likely to show up to work one day and find a pink slip. How­ever, the fact that she doesn’t have much of an emer­gency fund at all tells us that she prob­a­bly isn’t one to think about the future. The ques­tion has never crossed her mind of what she would do if the U.S. gov­ern­ment ceased to exist. Or if Con­gress, if able, changed the pen­sion plan for fed­eral judges. Per­haps she has made a ratio­nal deci­sion that because she has a guar­an­teed pen­sion, she can spend all the money she wants. More likely thoug, she is by nature a spender. These peo­ple live pay­check to pay­check with lit­tle regard for any prepa­ra­tion for unfore­seen events. This is trou­bling because at the very least, I would hope that she would ratio­nally con­sider what her rul­ings on the Court might affect far down the line before mak­ing a decision.

On top of that, even if she has made that ratio­nal deci­sion, it means that she is per­fectly happy liv­ing on the gov­ern­ment dole for the rest of her days. This also tells us some­thing about her char­ac­ter. It tells us that she believes in the role of gov­ern­ment to pro­vide for peo­ple even if they are able to pro­vide for them­selves. I think it prob­a­bly shows that she is likely to lean towards defen­dants even if their case is weak.

Over­all, all of this is cir­cum­stan­tial and cer­tainly noth­ing that couldn’t be deter­mined using other more reli­able meth­ods like exam­in­ing her judi­cial his­tory. How­ever, I would cer­tainly pre­fer some­one who was a great deal more con­cerned about being able to pro­vide for her­self even if the gov­ern­ment stopped pro­vid­ing for her. It tells me that she is likely to decide for cases that reward spenders, thus insti­tut­ing law that con­tin­ues our reliance on the Amer­i­can con­sumer as the foun­da­tion for our econ­omy, some­thing that I think is unsus­tain­able. She is also likely to decide for plain­tiffs who may be injured through some fault of their own because she does not sub­scribe to any belief that an indi­vid­ual is respon­si­ble for his actions, both short and long term. In gen­eral, it makes me ner­vous regard­ing cases involv­ing finan­cial mat­ters because hers are so obvi­ously broken.