President Obama's radical new nominee to replace Associate
Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court,
Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice
PRLDEF (White House
backgrounder), one of the racial grievance groups
that helped to sink the judicial nomination of Honduran-born
Miguel Estrada in 2003.
Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition
against President George W. Bush's 2001 nomination of
conservative Miguel
Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate
filibustered the nomination and a weary Estrada withdrew from
consideration in 2003.
Today LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3)
nonprofit, hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis
of her ethno-cultural heritage. "As the second largest and
fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of
qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate
for the president to nominate a Hispanic," the group said in
a
written statement. (PDF)
According to the group's website, it gets
some of its funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant
donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New
York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000
since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and
JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).
Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety
agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for
enforced multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education,
race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based
employment quotas, tenants' rights, and illegal immigrants'
rights.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense
and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of
Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages
35 to 41 of its
IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)