The United States Supreme Court has overturned a decision made by Obama nominee Sonia Sotomayor during her time as an appeals court judge.

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, with Antonin Scalia writing a concurrence. Kennedy finds that the failure to establish that the defendents met the requirements to discard the test amounts to a violation of  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and that the lower court — including Sotomayor — improperly applied the Equal Protection Clause.

We conclude that race-based action like the City’s in thiscase is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute. The respondents, we further determine, cannot meet that threshold standard. As a result, the City’s action in discarding the tests was a violation of Title VII. In light of our ruling under thestatutes, we need not reach the question whether respon-dents’ actions may have violated the Equal Protection Clause. …

In other words, there is no evidence —let alone the required strong basis in evidence—that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City. Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions. The City’s discarding the test results was impermissible under Title VII, and summary judgment is appropriate for petitioners on their disparate-treatment claim.

Justice Samuel Alito also wrote a concurrence, noting that the dissenters forgot to mention something:

I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately only because the dissent, while claiming that “[t]he Court’srecitation of the facts leaves out important parts of the story,” post, at 2 (opinion of GINSBURG, J.), provides an incomplete description of the events that led to New Haven’s decision to reject the results of its exam. The dissent’s omissions are important because, when all of the evidence in the record is taken into account, it is clear that, even if the legal analysis in Parts II and III–A of the dissent were accepted, affirmance of the decision below is untenable.

The overturn is really bad imagery for Congressional Democrats and the Obama White House. Up to this point they’ve been selling Sotomayor as one of the brightest minds in our nation. Now the very court she’s been appointed to is overruling her previous decisions, finding she inappropriately applied the Equal Protection Clause? Not the best press you can get.