Sotomayor confirmation hearings

This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who watched the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in which her answers were careful to reveal as little as possible about her views on anything, but it’s still rare for a new justice to admit that her hearings were tightly scripted, with administration [...]

Over the weekend, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported that a senior aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed that McConnell, at a meeting of conservative groups, asked the National Rifle Association whether it would score the vote on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a critical vote hostile to gun rights, with the intent [...]

From CQ:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., says he will schedule a vote on Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court for July 21, though any committee Republican can hold over the vote for one week.

Confirmation hearings covered Supreme Court nominee’s thoughts on foreign and international law.

For a comedian-turned-politician with no formal legal training, the newest senator and Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor some of the most complex but elucidating questions about Supreme Court cases we’ve heard yet. After bonding with Sotomayor over their mutual love of the Perry Mason show as kids, [...]

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is a former State Supreme Court judge.  So it’s hard to believe that he really doesn’t understand what judges do. Yet that’s exactly what his line of questioning to Judge Sonia Sotomayor on day three of her confirmation hearing this morning suggested.
Here’s Cornyn, speaking to Sotomayor with a tone of severe [...]

That seems to be the consensus of just about every legal and political expert who watched the first day of the Supreme Court nominee ably fending off attacks and responding to both soft and hardball questions. As we already knew, Supreme Court nominees are careful not to say anything — both because it can and [...]

Ouch. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) just lit into Sonia Sotomayor for being “a terror on the bench” and “nasty to lawyers,” and for attacking lawyers she disagrees with, citing the comments of anonymous lawyers quoted in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary.
“You stand out like a sore thumb in terms of your temperament,” he charged. [...]

Under intense grilling from Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) this afternoon, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was forced to confront directly her words in various speeches to minority law students over the past two decades in which she said that gender and ethnicity can affect how a judge views a case, and may in some situations affect the [...]

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been exceedingly careful not to say anything about any law that could possibly come before her as a Supreme Court justice, much to the evident frustration of some of the senators questioning her today — despite the fact that, as I noted before, they know she can’t and won’t answer the [...]