Senate Panel Approves Sotomayor

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13 to 6 Tuesday in favor of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination as a Supreme Court justice. The full Senate must now review her nomination, for confirmation. If approved — which is likely — Sotomayor will become the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.

The Washington Post:

The Senate Judiciary Committee this morning endorsed Sonia Sotomayor to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court on a largely partisan vote that sends her historic nomination to the full Senate for a final decision on her confirmation.

The 13 to 6 vote came nearly two weeks after the committee’s members grilled Sotomayor for 2½ days, eliciting answers that betrayed little indication of how the nominee, an appellate judge for the past 11 years, would rule on the most significant issues that come before the nation’s highest court.

Sotomayor is President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court and would become the court’s first Hispanic and its third female member. In choosing her in May, the president emphasized her Horatio Alger-like life story, rising from a poor childhood with a widowed mother in a Bronx housing project to attend two Ivy League universities, eventually becoming a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

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