Word: benching
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...Sotomayor worked for five years in the office of Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, where she prosecuted everything from petty drug crimes to felony assaults and murder. No less than her background in the projects, her experience pressing criminal cases may have affected her outlook years later on the bench. One case she presided over, U.S. v. Falso, seemed likely to go against police who had charged a man with possessing child pornography after they entered his house on a wrongly issued search warrant. Instead, Sotomayor ruled in favor of the officers. "It wasn't just a pro-prosecutor bias...
...arrived, and it couldn't come at a more difficult moment for her opponents. For now, the GOP strategy for dealing with Sotomayor is to walk softly and carry a big magnifying glass, searching for a potentially explosive opinion buried somewhere in her roughly 400 rulings from the federal bench. Republicans have their work cut out for them. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals hears plenty of cases involving business and securities law but not many that touch on the hot-button issues that make for good attack ads. Abortion, the death penalty, gay rights, executive power - those haven...
...over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds." But that case didn't require Sotomayor to comment on the fundamental premise of Roe v. Wade - that the Constitution provides a right to abortion. Nothing has come to light so far in her rulings from the bench that give any clue as to whether she thinks Roe was correctly decided...
...Republicans, opposing a candidate first nominated to the bench by a Republican President and twice confirmed by the Senate will be hard enough. But to do that without stumbling over the fact that she's also the first female Hispanic nominee will require an especially delicate touch. Having alienated many Hispanics with years of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the GOP can scarcely afford to drive them deeper into the Democratic fold. Last November, Obama won 67% of Latino votes, compared with John McCain's 31%, enough to put Florida, New Mexico and Colorado in the Democratic column...
Walking the careful line between pleasing the base and not offending Hispanics will be Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who became the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee when Arlen Specter switched parties last month. Sessions himself was once a Reagan nominee to the federal bench; he was rejected by this same committee - at the time controlled by Republicans - after reports surfaced that he had called the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People "un-American" and had once told a colleague that they "forced civil rights down the throats of people...