Senate political shift will influence nomination

WASHINGTON -- Four years after members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last convened to consider a Supreme Court nomination, a strikingly different group of senators gathered Monday to evaluate Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

The changes on the powerful panel reflect a generational shift in the Senate and a political shift in the nation. Both will influence not only the fate of Sotomayor's nomination but the shape of the judiciary for years to come.

That's because the Judiciary Committee has the power to speed up — or bottle up — a president's picks for more than 850 lifetime appointments to the federal bench.

None is more significant than the one the panel members began considering this week.

"After the decision to go to war, the second biggest decision you can make as a senator is a Supreme Court justice," says Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del. "Sotomayor is going to be on the court long after most of us are gone — and I mean gone-gone. It's the one thing you do that you know is going to have long-term implications."

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were up for confirmation in 2005, the Judiciary Committee was dominated by Republicans and freighted with seniority: Five of its members had been involved in the confirmations of almost every sitting member of the Supreme Court.

The committee that will hear from Sotomayor this week is the most lopsidedly Democratic since the one that considered Justice Thurgood Marshall's confirmation in 1967. Five of its members have never been through a Supreme Court confirmation hearing — unless you count a 1991 Saturday Night Live skit that featured newly-minted Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who was pretending to be a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Of the committee's 19 members, 13 hold law degrees; two have MBAs; one is a farmer; one is a doctor and one is a former mayor. Two are women.

Ten were in the Senate in 1998, when Sotomayor came up for confirmation to the job she currently holds, on the New York-based 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals: seven voted for her and three against.