Ahhh! the view from across the pond. mid paragraph is a well formulated caption of how Republicans on the panel viewed her nomination. Keep us the "just us" syndrome in IA, AL and elsewhere.
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Sotomayor confirmed by Senate judiciary committee
Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 July 2009 15.15 BST
Barack Obama's first supreme court nominee moves a step forward toward becoming first Hispanic on the bench
Sonia Sotomayor has advanced a step further toward taking a seat as America's first Hispanic supreme court justice today after a Senate panel confirmed her nomination.
Sotomayor, a New York federal judge, won the vote in the Senate judiciary committee which now forwards her nomination to the full Senate.
Sotomayor is President Barack Obama's first supreme court nominee. If confirmed by the full Senate she will replace David Souter, a liberal justice, and federal court watchers say she is unlikely radically to alter the court's ideological makeup.
Sotomayor emerged from a week of gruelling confirmation hearings intact, withstanding repeated questioning by Senate Republicans about her views on positive discrimination, her public remarks about the role her Hispanic heritage plays in her judging, and even her temperament. The hearings presented the spectacle of a cadre of aging white male conservatives aggressively taking a Hispanic woman to task for statements in which she said she was proud of the way her upbringing affects her legal sensibility.
Sotomayor faced a team of Republicans attempting to tread warily between pleasing their conservative, often largely white supporters, and alienating Hispanic voters, who constitute one of the fastest growing electorates in the country.
"I question if Judge Sotomayor will be able to set aside personal biases and prejudices to decide cases in an impartial manner and in accordance with the Constitution," Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said yesterday in announcing his plan to vote against her.
Republican Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who has led the opposition to Sotomayor, yesterday wrote in USA Today raising the spectre of "judicial activism", a term without any agreed-upon legal meaning that conservatives invoke to oppose liberal judges whom they say would craft policy from the bench rather than adhere to the law.
"I don't believe that Judge Sotomayor has the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism," wrote Sessions, whose early political career was tainted by accusations of racism. "She has evoked its mantra too often. As someone who cares deeply about our great heritage of law, I must withhold my consent."
Democrats, meanwhile, have noted Sotomayor's 17 years on the federal bench, more experience than any sitting supreme court justice had upon ascending to that court. They also praise her rise from a hardscrabble upbringing in a housing estate in a poor section of the Bronx, New York, through Princeton and Yale law school, and her experience as a prosecuting attorney and corporate litigator.
"Judge Sotomayor has the superior intellect, broad experience, superb judgment and unquestioned integrity that would make her an outstanding nominee at any time," Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware said last week.
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