National Journal's Stuart Taylor takes a harder look at Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Ricci case to adopt the district court's "reasoning" wholesale and finds it troubling.

The panel's decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton's opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that -- contrary to Sotomayor's position -- the Connecticut city's decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.

Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor's onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel's ruling.

"Municipal employers could reject the results of an employment examination whenever those results failed to yield a desired racial outcome -- i.e., failed to satisfy a racial quota," Cabranes wrote.

The Sotomayor-endorsed position allowed such a "race-based employment decision," Cabranes added, even though the New Haven exams were "carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality" and even though the city had neither found nor tried to find a more job-related test.

The Cabranes dissent and the voluminous factual record that was before the Sotomayor panel flatly contradict the widely stated view that her position was justified by evidence that the exams were not job-related and that they discriminated against blacks in violation of the "disparate-impact" provisions of federal civil-rights law.

In fact, neither Sotomayor nor any other judge has ever found that the exams -- one for would-be fire lieutenants, one for would-be captains -- were invalid or unfair. Nor has any judge found that allowing the promotions would have violated disparate-impact law.

I encourage you to read the entire article, because it appears that Sotomayor ruled on the basis of politics and policy and not what the law requires.

Elections have consequences, but you should know what you're getting when you vote for a liberal like President Barack Obama.