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| Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, center, walks down a staircase in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 2,2009, to her meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor sought Tuesday to hit back against GOP charges that she would let her background dictate her rulings, telling senators in both parties that she would follow the law as a justice.
In private meetings that marked her Capitol Hill debut, Sotomayor, who would be the high court's first Hispanic and its third woman, explained her views of a judge's role and the impact of her life experiences to leaders of the Judiciary Committee, which will have the first crack at weighing her confirmation.
"Ultimately and completely, a judge has to follow the law no matter what their upbringing has been," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the panel chairman, quoted President Barack Obama's nominee as saying in their closed-door session on Capitol Hill.
Leahy had asked Sotomayor, 54, what she meant when she said in 2001 that she hoped her decisions as a "wise Latina" would be better than those of a white male who hadn't had the same experiences. Prominent Republicans have cited the 2001 remark to call her a racist.
Leahy said the judge told him: "Of course one's life experience shapes who you are, but ... as a judge, you follow the law."
Sen. Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, the top Republican on the committee, said Sotomayor used those words with him as well, but he appeared to come away from the meetings unconvinced about Sotomayor's approach and whether she would be an "activist" who tried to set policy from the bench.
"She used those words, and of course the question is what is the law? How does a judge find the law, and what approach to statutory construction do they utilize?" Sessions said.
Sessions, who is to meet Wednesday with Leahy to discuss scheduling Sotomayor's confirmation process, said he thought hearings should wait until September.
"I don't think it's good to rush," he said.
Leahy called the criticism against Sotomayor "among the most vicious attacks that have been received by anybody" and said the rhetoric demands hearings, "sooner than later." Democrats hope to begin the sessions as early as the first full week of July.
Leahy said he asked the judge whether he could repeat publicly what she told him privately during their meeting about how her personal experiences as the New York-born daughter of Puerto Rican parents who was reared in a housing project and went on to Princeton and Yale before ascending to the highest legal echelons would shape her rulings.
Leahy quoted Sotomayor as saying, "There's not one law for one race or another. There's not one law for one color or another. There's not one law for rich, a different one for poor. There's only one law."
Radio host Rush Limbaugh and former House Speaker New Gingrich have both branded Sotomayor a racist, and Limbaugh went on to compare choosing her for the high court to nominating former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Leahy defended Sotomayor on Tuesday, saying he was proud of his own Irish-Italian background and his wife's French-Canadian background. "Does that make us racist?" he said. "She is not a racist."
Earlier in the day, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Sotomayor's life story "compelling," and said it appealed to the public.
"We have the whole package here," Reid said. "America identifies with the underdog, and you've been an underdog many times in your life, but always the top dog."
His comments came as a new Associated Press-GfK poll showed that Americans have a more favorable first impression of Sotomayor than they did for any of former President George W. Bush's nominees to the high court, and backs her confirmation in higher numbers.
Sotomayor was scheduled to meet with 10 senators during her first day on Capitol Hill, retreating to Vice President Joe Biden's office between sessions to huddle with White House handlers, a team heavy with confirmation battle veterans who are guiding her nomination.
Among those she was to see Tuesday were Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, members of the Judiciary Committee. She was having lunch with her home state Democratic senators, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, her unofficial chaperone during the confirmation process, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Feinstein said she would ask Sotomayor about the "wise Latina" comment, which she said had been "made into something egregious." She said she also wants to discuss important constitutional topics including abortion, a hot-button issue on which Sotomayor's views are not known .
"I'll ask her how she views the constitutional right to privacy," Feinstein said, adding that she "might" inquire about Sotomayor's position on the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman's right to end her pregnancy.
