Fighting Sotomayor tricky for GOP

WASHINGTON | A week before her Senate hearings, Republicans are floundering in their efforts to trip up Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, unable to find an effective message about why she is not fit to serve.

Blame the tricky politics of opposing the woman who would be the first Hispanic justice, especially for a party struggling to broaden its base and whose chief spokesman on Judge Sotomayor has a troubled history of racism allegations.

Add to that the mathematical impossibility of Republicans’ rejecting President Obama’s first high court nominee, and it’s a recipe for a weak-kneed response.

Conservative activists have noticed, and they are not happy.

“Too many Republicans and conservatives planned to lose instead of planning to win” the debate over Judge Sotomayor, said Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch. His group has mounted strong opposition to the federal appeals court judge.

About half the Senate’s Republicans are willing to raise serious questions about Judge Sotomayor, and there is “a sizable minority who - partly because she’s Hispanic - just want this to go away,” said Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice.

Conservative groups have sought to convince Senate Republicans that they can benefit politically from strongly opposing Judge Sotomayor. But many of their leaders complain the message is not getting through.

During recent confrontations, some activists have told Republican senators, “Don’t throw away yet another conservative agenda item when it’s a successful one for you. Your base cares about this, and you should, too,” said former Rep. David McIntosh, Indiana Republican, who’s advising some outside groups on Judge Sotomayor’s nomination. “It was kind of a blunt message.”

There are good reasons for Republicans to be holding back, wondering what their best approach is to opposing a nominee who is broadly acknowledged to be qualified and whose past rulings make it difficult to pigeonhole her as a liberal crusader.

Republicans have just 40 votes in the Senate - well short of the majority it would need to defeat Judge Sotomayor or to sustain a drawn-out effort to block a final vote to confirm her.

Even if they could stall Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, though, it is evident that many Republicans do not think it is politically prudent to take on a Hispanic woman, given the GOP’s low standing in the polls and its efforts to appeal to women and minorities. Those groups traditionally have shunned the party.

The issue of race and ethnicity has proven a toxic one for the key Republican carrying the party message on Judge Sotomayor: Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the senior GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which begins hearings on Judge Sotomayor on July 13.

Mr. Sessions’ own nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986 was scuttled by allegations that he made racist comments and targeted black civil rights leaders as a federal prosecutor in Alabama.

He denied those charges. But he did acknowledge making what he called some off-color “jokes,” such as calling civil rights groups - such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - “un-American.”

Mr. Sessions has spoken in similar terms recently about a Puerto Rican legal advocacy group on whose board the nominee sat from 1980 to 1992.

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