Opinion: Sotomayor hearings: Sessions comes out swinging

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Much of the speculation surrounding the Sotomayor hearings has centered on the role that would be played by Sen. Jeff Sessons, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

This is Sessions’ first confirmation hearing of any kind as the top Republican, and several senators may take their cues from him. But he’s walking a fine line.

Republicans are concerned that coming out too aggressively against Sotomayor, a history-making nominee as the first Latina named to the high court, will damage the party with Latino and other minority voters — the same demographics the GOP needs to court to regain its national footing.

Sessions, a former U.S. attorney, is an unlikely face for any Republican rebranding effort, however. He’s a conservative, old-school Alabaman — and he sounds like it. The contrast between Sessions’ antebellum accent and Sotomayor’s nasal New York drawl will make for compelling television, as well as serve as a potent symbol of where this nation was and where it’s going.

But Sessions signaled this morning, as the hearings got underway, that’s he ready to be the Republican point man for criticizing the nominee. He called Sotomayor’s stated belief, expressed several times in speeches, that life experiences affect her judging “shocking and offensive to me.”

He mocked the president’s “empathy” standard for selecting a nominee, questioned her role as a board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1980s and puzzled over the her court’s opinion in the Ricci vs. New Haven firefighter case, in which her three-judge panel sided with minority applicants who performed less favorably on promotion tests than their white colleagues. That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court.

“It seems to me that in Ricci, Judge Sotomayor’s empathy for one group of firefighters turned out to be prejudice against the others,” Sessions said.

Sessions is likely to begin questioning Sotomayor in earnest Tuesday morning.

-- James Oliphant