For nearly a decade, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been the reliable go-to when progressive law professors needed someone on the bench to throw a sharp elbow at the conservative majority. This week, she did something none of us ever expected to see — she publicly apologized to Justice Brett Kavanaugh for previous criticism she had leveled at him.
Funny how a 6-3 conservative Court turns ‘fiery dissent’ into ‘please let me keep my parking spot.’
Sotomayor issued the walk-back on April 15 in what can only be described as one of the more stunning moments in recent Supreme Court history. This is the same justice who, for years, treated the conservative wing of the Court like a waiting room full of hostile strangers. Now she’s on the record apologizing to the guy the Left tried to destroy with Christine Blasey Ford, high school yearbooks, and alleged gang rape parties at a bar that didn’t exist.
Welcome to the upside-down.
Let’s remember what these people did to Brett Kavanaugh. We all watched it live. Democrats dragged that man and his family through a public lynching in 2018, accused him of everything short of running a cartel, and then pretended to be stunned when voters noticed that none of it was true. The Left was so sure Kavanaugh was going to hand them some kind of constitutional scalp that Sotomayor and her colleagues on the Left flank spent years sniping at his reasoning, his credibility, and even his temperament.
And now? ‘Sorry, Brett. My bad.’
Here’s what’s actually happening. The liberal bloc on the Court has finally figured out that they lost. They aren’t the majority. They aren’t going to be the majority for a long time. And the only way to salvage any influence whatsoever is to stop spitting in the faces of the six conservatives who are actually writing the law of the land.
You want to be taken seriously in chambers? Turns out step one is not sneering at the guys writing the opinions.
For years, we were told Sotomayor was the ‘voice of the marginalized’ on the Court. She gave speeches at law schools. She did the friendly podcast circuit. She published a children’s book. She was practically running a book tour while the Left insisted she was the moral compass of American jurisprudence. But something changed after Dobbs. Something changed again after the Chevron decision. And after the immunity ruling, and the Second Amendment rulings, and the DEI-in-education rulings, it became very clear that the Sotomayor wing is not driving the bus anymore. They’re not even in the front seat. They’re in the way back asking if they can pick the radio station.
So now we get apologies.
Kavanaugh, for his part, has done exactly what conservatives have been telling him to do since his confirmation hearings — keep his head down, keep writing opinions, and let the results speak for themselves. The man never shouted back. He never held a press conference. He never got on cable news to whine about his treatment. He just kept showing up for work. And now, six and a half years later, the woman who spent years framing him as an illegitimate member of the Court is saying she was out of line.
Classic.
The real tell here is how the media is handling it. Have you noticed this story hasn’t exactly lit up the front pages of The New York Times or the Washington Post? The people who spent 2018 convinced that Kavanaugh was going to be impeached any minute now suddenly have no comment on why one of their heroes just ate her words in public. If the apology had run the other direction — if Kavanaugh had apologized to Sotomayor for something — we’d be on Day 47 of wall-to-wall coverage, think pieces, and MSNBC panels.
But this one? Crickets. Because it doesn’t fit the script.
The narrative the Left sold us for years was that the conservative justices were dangerous, radical, and illegitimate. The reality that’s now playing out in real time is that the conservative justices are winning case after case, writing tight legal reasoning, and operating like grown-ups. Meanwhile, the liberal wing is reduced to walking back old insults because the people they insulted are running the place.
You know who saw this coming? Mitch McConnell. Love him or hate him, the old turtle was right about one thing — judges matter. That man spent his entire career building the bench that is now making Sotomayor swallow her words. Every Federalist Society dinner, every judicial pick, every confirmation fight the McConnell Senate won during Trump’s first term — it all added up to this moment.
A liberal Supreme Court justice publicly apologizing to the guy the Left tried to destroy.
We should take a minute and appreciate how far we’ve come. Eight years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton would replace Scalia and the Supreme Court would swing hard Left for a generation. Instead, we got Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Roe is gone. Chevron is gone. The administrative state is being shrunk case by case. And Sotomayor is apologizing.
There’s a lesson here for the younger conservatives in the audience. When the Left is throwing rocks, don’t throw rocks back. Don’t get in the mud. Just keep winning. Keep stacking courts. Keep passing legislation. Keep building institutions. The day will come when the people who attacked you are standing in front of a microphone walking it all back.
And we’ll still be here, writing about it.
Sotomayor will keep her job. Kavanaugh will keep his job. The Court will keep grinding out 6-3 decisions that make law professors cry into their oat milk lattes. But something has shifted. The liberal wing knows they lost. And now, finally, they’re starting to act like it.
About time.