A baseball player will make a pitch for Sonia Sotomayor during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing that began today.
Two firefighters will be there to make the case against Sotomayor, who has been nominated by President Obama to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme court left by the retirement of Justice David Souter.
The entire witness list for the hearing indicates that the majority Democrats will emphasize Sotomayor’s legal career. It will also stress her remarkable personal story as a Latina who grew up in humble circumstances and went on to extraordinary success.
Sonia Sotomayor
A graduate of Yale Law School, Sotomayor, 55, has been a federal prosecutor, a lawyer in private practice and then a federal district court judge. She is now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District.
Republicans will raise doubts about Sotomayor’s judicial opinions, especially on the issues of gun control and affirmative action.
According to reports, they will also argue that Sotomayor at least implicitly advocated abortion and affirmative action and opposed capital punishment when she was a board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is among the 15 witnesses asked by Democrats to speak on Sotomayor’s behalf.
The group also includes Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who hired Sotomayor right out of law school to work as an assistant district attorney in his office.
Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, is also scheduled to testify for Sotomayor.
So, too, is David Cone, the former star pitcher for the New York Yankees, the New York Mets and other teams. He’ll speak about Sotomayor’s ruling in 1995 that sided with the players and ended a Major League Baseball strike.
The Democratic list also includes JoAnne A. Epps of the National Association of Women Lawyers, Ramona Romero, the national president of the Hispanic Bar Association and Rep. Nydia Velazquez, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
On the Republican side, a list of 14 witnesses includes two of the firefighters who successfully sued the City of New Haven, Conn., for reverse discrimination in a case that came through Sotomayor’s court.
Sotomayor was on a panel of three appellate judges that sided with the city in the case, but the Supreme Court ruled the other way in a 5-4 decision last month.
One of the firefighters, Frank Ricci, is dyslexic and worked hard to do well on a promotion exam only to see the city throw out the exam because too few members of minority groups had done well enough.
The other firefighter to testify, Ben Vargas, is Puerto Rican, as is Sotomayor. His good results on the promotion exam were also discarded when the city decided not to count the results
The witnesses against Sotomayor’s confirmation also include Sandra S. Froman, the former president of the National Rifle Association of America, and Stephen P. Halbrook, an attorney and author on the Second Amendment.
Charmaine Yoest, the president and CEO of Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, will testify against Sotomayor’s confirmation.
Also speaking against the nomination will be Linda Chavez, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and an opponent of affirmative action.
Neomi Rao, a law professor at George Mason University who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and then worked in the George W. Bush White House will speak against confirmation.
Speaking neither for the Democrats nor the Republicans will be two representatives of the American Bar Association, Kim J. Askew and Mary M. Boies. The association has rated Sotomayor “well-qualified” for the court, its highest rating.
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