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Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court - Sonia Sotomayor - Questionnaire
http://judiciary.senate.gov/nominations/SupremeCourt/Sotomayor/SoniaSotomayor-Questionnaire.cfm
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This is going to be very interesting ... there’ll probably be a lot of bloviating, as each Judiciary Committee member will be getting 30 minute sessions.
I can’t remember what the old timeframe was, but it sure wasn’t 30 minutes. I’m wondering who changed it, why, what the motive was, and what will be the result as the senators fill that time with their questions and her responses.
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*snip*
THE LEAD PLAYERS
Chairman Leahy, D-Vt.
If he looks familiar, it could be because he’s been in the Senate for more than three decades and participated in hearings of every Supreme Court nominee since now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Or it could be the Batman movies. With white hair and bifocals, the man with the gavel has had cameos in all of them, and a speaking part in “The Dark Knight.”
Leahy, 69, will be in charge of keeping senators to their
allotted 30 minutes for questions,
tamping down the inevitable showboating and issuing stern warnings to any protesters who get out of hand.
It’s good to be chairman, by the way: He can allot himself all the time he wants to rebut points Republicans try to make or to ask clarifying questions of the nominee. Leahy was a state prosecutor for eight years before coming to the Senate. The grandfather of five is an avid photographer seen at previous hearings snapping pictures of news photographers as they snap photos of him.
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Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Taking his first turn as the lead Republican at a Supreme Court hearing, the 62-year-old Sessions will sit next to Leahy and, in broad terms, try to reassure the vanquished GOP base that their interests are being represented in this most visible forum.
Sessions wants to know whether Sotomayor allows personal views, not just the law, to influence her rulings. He has raised doubts about her support for the constitutional right to keep and bear arms and her association with a Puerto Rican civil rights group before she became a federal judge 17 years ago.
But conservative critics of Sotomayor have been unable to get the Senate’s 40 Republicans to stand together against her, and Sessions has said he doesn’t “sense a filibuster in the works” to block her confirmation.
Personally and politically, he’s got big shoes to fill and a delicate line to walk in this role. Sessions is succeeding the sharp-tongued Specter, chairman at the previous two Supreme Court hearings.
Sessions, in his third term, has plenty of experience grilling witnesses; he’s a former federal prosecutor. But he has stumbled over issues of race. Comments he allegedly made sank his own nomination by President Ronald Reagan to be a federal judge.
Rest here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090713/ap_on_go_co/us_sotomayor_senate_roles