AP stretches for a new Supreme Court scandal

One of these things is not like the other: being a Supreme Court justice who writes books and goes on book tours to support said books, and being a Supreme Court justice who gets luxury vacations and financial assistance from billionaire friends who bankroll extreme partisan groups who are in the business of getting cases before the Supreme Court, some of them manufactured from the start. But for the Associated Press, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s literary career is a scandal worthy of a 2,300-word exposé.

“For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation’s highest court,” AP’s investigators report. “She has benefited, too—from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years,” they gasp.

Presumably her share of those book sales are disclosed as income by Sotomayor, since AP doesn’t report otherwise. The scandal AP is trying to stir up is that her staff has “often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books.” And that these events at public institutions are “largely out of public view,” which is interesting since they are being held at, again, public institutions like schools and libraries.