WASHINGTON -- Before nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Barack Obama did not ask her about abortion rights or any other "specific legal issue," she testified yesterday, as she sidestepped senators' efforts to plumb her views on matters from campaign finance law to the workload of the court she is likely to join.
As she progressed through the third day of her confirmation hearings, with no sign of a major mishap so far that would derail her approval by a heavily Democratic Senate, Judge Sotomayor relaxed -- yet took no chances. She joked openly with Judiciary Committee members while increasingly avoiding their questions. By mid-afternoon, even two Democrats on the panel sounded frustrated by her long, elusive replies.
During his turn to question her, Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., repeatedly cut her off mid-sentence as he sensed she was skirting topic after topic. "I think your record is exemplary, Judge Sotomayor -- exemplary," he said. "I'm not commenting about your answers."
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who was sworn in to the chamber last week, was more direct. "So that means you're not going to tell us?" he asked the nominee, after struggling to elicit her position on a recent Supreme Court decision involving voting rights.
At the same time, several Democrats sought yesterday to protect Judge Sotomayor from Republican efforts to dent her credibility and assertions of neutrality.
The Democrats pointed out that two of the main pieces of political artillery the GOP has wielded against her -- her public remarks that a Latina might make the best judge as well as her dozen years on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund -- are not new. Both were known, they said, when the Senate confirmed her twice in the 1990s, first as a federal trial judge and then as a member of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
"So this is nothing new to the Senate. Is that correct?" Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Judge Sotomayor about her membership on the advocacy group's board before she joined the bench. "That's correct," she replied.
No Republicans have said whether they will join Democrats in supporting Judge Sotomayor's confirmation. Late yesterday afternoon, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, R-S.C., who had signaled before the hearings that he might vote for her, said: "She's doing good." Mr. Graham said his decision could hinge on follow-up questions he plans to ask about her most controversial public remarks.
Judge Sotomayor's hearings will continue today as senators conclude a second round of questioning, then present witnesses who have been invited by the two political parties.
In not allowing senators to pin her down on concrete matters of law, Judge Sotomayor, 55, borrowed an approach that has been used by most nominees to the nation's highest court since the failed nomination two decades ago of Robert Bork, a conservative jurist and scholar.
Like her, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito, at their confirmation hearings in 2005 and 2006, respectively, said they could not address many of the questions that senators raised because they involved areas of the law that were settled -- or on which they might be asked to rule in the future.
Judge Sotomayor also sought to tamp down comments about her ideological leanings -- focusing, in particular, on remarks by the senior partner at Pavia & Harcourt, a New York law firm where she worked between serving as an assistant district attorney and becoming a judge. Noting that former colleague George Pavia has been quoted lately as saying, "I can guarantee she'll be for abortion rights," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked the nominee: "On what basis would Mr. Pavia say that, if you know?"
"I have no idea why he's drawing that conclusion," she replied. "If he was talking about the fact that I served on a particular board that promoted equal opportunity for people, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, then you could talk about that being a liberal instinct, in the sense that I promote equal opportunity in America and the attempts to ensure that.
"But he has not read my jurisprudence for 17 years, I can assure you. He's a corporate litigator. And my experience with corporate litigators is that they only look at the law when it affects the case before them."
Judge Sotomayor also skirted pointed questions from Mr. Cornyn and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., about her views on abortion rights. Mr. Coburn, one of the Senate's leading abortion foes and a doctor who has delivered hundreds of babies, asked how she would handle a case involving a woman seeking to abort a fetus at 38 weeks after learning the baby had spina bifida.
"I can't answer that question in the abstract because I would have to look at what the state of the state's law was on that question," Judge Sotomayor said.
First Published: July 16, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
