Live from the Capitol, Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings promise high political theater this week, beamed to the world in dramatic, historic, perhaps comedic glory.
When the curtain rises Monday on Sotomayor’s nomination to become the Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice, a large cast of ambitious players will be ready to explore themes from racial conflict to legal controversy, as well as personal facts and views.
A viewer’s guide to the faces certain to nab key screen time during the Sotomayor’s made-for-TV hearings:
Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
If he looks familiar, it could be because he’s been in the Senate for more than three decades and participated in hearings of every Supreme Court nominee since now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Leahy, 69, will be in charge of keeping senators to their allotted 30 minutes for questions, tamping down the inevitable showboating and issuing stern warnings to any protesters who get out of hand.
It’s good to be chairman, by the way: He can allot himself all the time he wants to rebut points Republicans try to make or to ask clarifying questions of the nominee. Leahy was a state prosecutor for eight years before coming to the Senate.
» Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Taking his first turn as the lead Republican at a Supreme Court hearing, the 62-year-old Sessions will sit next to Leahy and, in broad terms, try to reassure the vanquished GOP base that their interests are being represented in this most visible forum.
Sessions wants to know whether Sotomayor allows personal views, not just the law, to influence her rulings. He has raised doubts about her support for the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Sessions, in his third term, has plenty of experience grilling witnesses; he’s a former federal prosecutor. But he has stumbled over issues of race. Comments he allegedly made sank his own nomination by President Ronald Reagan to be a federal judge.
Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa.
“Snarlin’ Arlen,” 79, enters these hearings more experienced at running them than Leahy, yet without the privileges of the seniority that ordinarily comes with five Senate terms.
Democrats stripped him of that when he joined their party this year. He switched, he said, because he could not have won a GOP primary in Pennsylvania as a Republican.
Specter is not expected to behave in the traditionally deferential manner of a junior senator. He was chairman at the hearings of now-Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. And he knows Senate tradition, the law and the Constitution as well as any expert in the room. He’s famous for bucking the leadership of his party.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
The second-term senator, 57, has perhaps the best picture of this particular nomination and its political implications of anyone on the panel. Like Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., he represents a large state and a constituency that’s about one-third Hispanic.
Cornyn also is the Republican point man for the 2010 Senate elections, charged with raising money and helping the GOP rebound from a defeat that handed Democrats a 60-seat, filibuster-resistant majority.
In Texas, he served on the state Supreme Court and as attorney general.
