Conservatives may, in the long run, owe a thank-you to the “Wise Latina.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped the shark Tuesday with her lengthy dissent from the Schuette decision, read aloud from the bench. Although the liberal media sympathize with her and presented the decision as a setback, the positions she took are at variance with both the clear meaning of the text of the Constitution and with the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans, who consistently vote against racial preferences whenever they get the chance.

John Hinderaker of Powerline concisely summed up the essence of the position argued by Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg (who concurred with her dissent):

The majority held that a state can indeed ban discrimination on the basis of race. Whew! Some of us thought that issue was settled by the 14th Amendment. But two justices, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, dissented: they would have held that states are required to engage in race discrimination, no matter how much a state’s citizens may protest in favor of equal treatment.

Thank God, in his Powerline colleague Scott Johnson’s words, “The Constitution is still constitutional.” Sotomayor, a big believer in the theory of a “living Constitution,” would have it that the “compelling state interest in diversity,” as she put it in her dissent, empowers the Supreme Court to override the actual words of the Constitution and substitute her own preference that some minorities (though not Asians, who suffer discrimination under the racial preference system) deserve a thumb on the scale. And if that causes whites, Asians, and other non-preferred groups (can we please call them “targets”?) to be denied opportunities that their merit has earned them, the Wise Latina is not concerned.

Mike Gonzalez, a Vice President of the Heritage Foundation, raises some interesting questions about her position in the New York Post:

For Sotomayor, of course, affirmative action is personal. She’s said she believes she got into Princeton and Yale Law because of affirmative action, disclosing once that “my test scores were not comparable to that of my colleagues at Princeton or Yale.”

It’s what came afterward, when a big law firm came recruiting at Yale, that is more revealing. One partner in the firm asked her, “Would you have been admitted to the law school if you were not a Puerto Rican?”

Sotomayor didn’t react well, lodging a complaint with Yale. The firm had to apologize to the university, lest it lose its coveted right to recruit at the nation’s top law school.

But what on earth did Sotomayor expect? What else did she think could possibly result from racial preferences?

Even more interesting, Gonzalez wonders why Hispanic and other immigrants are entitled to any preferences at all:

There’s nothing in the Hispanic experience in America that compares with the repulsive system of slavery. Some Jim Crow laws did affect some Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest, but there was nothing comparable with the African-American experience.

And the vast majority of today’s Hispanics either immigrated here or, more likely, descended from people who immigrated of their own volition. They chose to come here to better their lives.

Sure, America isn’t perfect. No place on this earth can be. But millions of immigrants for 2½ centuries have obviously decided that the advantages far outweigh what problems there are. We should honor their choice.

With her extreme positions and her elevated judicial standing, Sotomayor has now become the poster girl for self-interested racial preferences. Her mediocre performance on SAT and LSAT tests served as a predictor of her performance on the Court. Two fellow liberals on the Court abandoned her, leaving only Ginsburg in her camp. And as I have been reporting, the Left now is after Ginsburg, trying to get her to resign so that President Obama can appoint a young and healthy liberal to spend the next few decades rewriting the Constitution