Sotomayor So Far: Warnings, Handshakes and Girl Power

As Judge Sonia Sotomayor took her seat at the witness table before the start of her confirmation hearings this morning, Republican senators lined up to greet her one by one. Sens. Orin Hatch, Jon Kyl, Charles Grassley, and ranking member Jeff Sessions filed up to the table where Sotomayor had settled in to shake her hand or whisper a message in her ear.

After the Republicans greeted her, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar, the two women on the panel, offered the judge their best wishes. With a double fist-pump and a smile, Feinstein and Klobuchar said goodbye.

Both images, of Republicans welcoming the Democratic nominee, and women greeting a fellow female as she makes her case to join the Supreme Court, have larger meanings.

Sessions, the top Republican, has promised to stay away from personal attacks on Sotomayor, but neither he nor his fellow party members have promised not to attack her record. The senators have, instead, put together a clear strategy, executed in unison in recent weeks through speeches on the Senate floor, appearances on cable television, and memos to conservative groups, to paint Sotomayor as a liberal activist judge.

Their group hello this morning put a velvet glove on the iron approach that Republicans will take toward the hearings this week. In his opening statement, Sessions said that any judges who allow their personal backgrounds to sway their decisions before the court, as he has said he believes Sotomayor does, hold a philosophy that is "disqualifying." He added, "Call it empathy, call it prejudice, or call it sympathy, but whatever it is, it is not law."

Feinstein and Klobuchar's moment with the judge reminded anyone watching how different this panel is from the one that weighed the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas in 1991. When Anita Hill delivered her explosive charges against Thomas, she did so with no women looking back at her from the panel. Today, when Feinstein spoke in support of Sotomayor, she said, "Judge Sotomayor, your nomination I view with a great sense of personal pride." Feinstein went on to describe Sotomayor as the most experienced nominee to the Supreme Court in almost 100 years.

Standing behind Sotomayor while the Republican and female senators greeted her was Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee's chairman, who gave his own opening statement to begin the hearing. Leahy listed previous nomination hearings that devolved into character attacks on nominees who would eventually make history, including the court's first Jewish member, Louis Brandeis. Leahy warned to his fellow senators, "Let no one demean this extraordinary woman, her success and the constitutional duties she has performed."