GOP strategy looks beyond Sotomayor

GOP spokesmen acknowledge, some openly, that they are unlikely to derail Sotomayor’s nomination, so they are instead looking ahead to the appointment battles to follow.

“We could be at a legal crossroads,’’ said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

If Obama nominates judges who lean to the left despite “the objective standards of the law,’’ Sessions said, “the entire federal judiciary could be altered over the years. The American people are concerned about this.’’

Republicans, still stinging from Democrats’ ability to block many of President George W. Bush’s nominees to lower courts on ideological grounds, need to guard against a liberal shift by the first Democratic president in nine years, analysts say.

Yet both sides agree the confirmation of Sotomayor alone probably won’t alter the court’s ideological makeup. Observers and analysts say she has a solid record in 17 years as a federal judge and is highly respectful of judicial precedent.

“She’s a moderate, not a radical, not even a liberal,’’ said Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and a former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights. But the liberal Alliance for Justice believes Sotomayor, who would become the court’s first Hispanic justice and only its third woman, could influence her Supreme Court colleagues to adopt a more liberal view of the law - much like the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice.

Since Obama chose Sotomayor in May, most Senate Republicans have acknowledged her impressive credentials and inspiring life story: Raised by a single mother in the Bronx housing projects, she earned two Ivy League degrees with honors and became an esteemed New York City prosecutor. A Republican, President George H.W. Bush, first chose her for the federal bench in 1992, and President Clinton, a Democrat, elevated her to the appeals court five years later. The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed her both times.

With Democrats controlling the Judiciary Committee and the Senate, odds are she will be confirmed again. But Sessions and other GOP critics see vulnerabilities in her record, centered on the issue of race and affirmative action.

As a young lawyer, Sotomayor was a ranking member of a Latino civil rights organization that supports affirmative action, and the Supreme Court recently overturned her ruling against white firefighters in a reverse discrimination case. Skeptics also point to selected remarks she made on race - including her now-famous quote that she would hope that a “wise Latina’’ judge would often be better at dispensing justice than a white man.

“Is she allowing her personal or political agenda to cloud her judgment and favor one group of individuals over another irrespective of what the law says?’’ top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell asked in a speech on the Senate floor last week.

At the hearings, Republicans will call on two firefighters who were plaintiffs in the controversial reverse-discrimination case. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, and Ben Vargas, the only Hispanic plaintiff, sued the City of New Haven when it voided a promotions exam in which too many whites and not enough minorities scored highly enough to advance. Sotomayor was on an appeals court panel that sided with New Haven last year, but the Supreme Court ruled for the firefighters two weeks ago.

The firefighters “are important just to show that there are two sides to every lawsuit,’’ Sessions told reporters Friday. He said the men worked hard to get ahead, but the city changed the rules “with a view to favor a racial group in the case.’’

Their testimony, however, could turn a judicial confirmation hearing into a referendum on race for the first time since the dramatic 1991 hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s second African-American.

“She’ll be confirmed. Everyone knows that,’’ said Michael Greve, a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank. Still, he said, “her views on race and diversity is on everyone’s mind. . . . It’s her only vulnerability, if in fact there is one.’’

Recent polls show a public split on the issue: While 65 percent of those asked in a June CNN survey said the New Haven firefighters should have been promoted, an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll in June found that 63 percent of those who responded support affirmative action, as long as quotas aren’t involved.

Sotomayor will be grilled over her role in the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice, an organization that fights discrimination against Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. A member from 1980 to the early 1990s, when she resigned after becoming a judge, Sotomayor signed memos declaring that advancement exams for New York City civil servants - including the city police, fire, and sanitation departments - were unfair to Hispanics, who were underrepresented in the upper ranks.

Sessions said Sotomayor must answer questions about the group because judges “must be absolutely committed to remove any biases, prejudices, or sympathies they have.’’

Firing hostile questions on the issues of race and ethnicity could backfire, however. Many Latino voters, an increasingly powerful constituency, are still angry at the Republican party for opposing an immigration reform bill that gave illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. They are likely to closely watch the nationally televised hearings.

Nevertheless, it is expected that Sotomayor, 55, will have to take tough questions about her stands on gun rights, labor law, and abortion, among other issues. While Republicans put leaders of gun rights and anti-abortion groups on their witness list, Democrats will call on past colleagues, and some with Republican credentials, to vouch for her.

Like most other nominees, however, Sotomayor has undergone intense White House training to prepare her for the heat. That could make it even harder for the Republicans to knock her off balance.

“Their strategy is very challenging,’’ said Stephen Wermiel, a constitutional law professor at American University and a political analyst. “It is a very difficult line for them to walk, to use her race and her views about race and not attack her race.’’

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the judiciary panel of 12 Democrats and seven Republicans, isn’t worried about Sotomayor’s performance. Her judicial record is beyond reproach, especially on issues of race, he said.

“If they ask, ‘Are you going to follow the law on racial issues?’ her answer will be, ‘Yes, of course,’ ’’ Leahy said. “If they say, ‘Look how you got into Princeton,’ her response will be, ‘Look at how well I did once I got into school, look how well I did in private practice, look how well I did as a prosecutor. Look at how good of a judge I was.’ ’’

Joseph Williams can be reached at jowilliams@globe.com.