US President Barack Obama on Tuesday nominated an "inspiring woman," appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. The move, which will delight Latino voters, a fast-growing demographic bloc which helped power Obama's election win last year, will mark the president's first bid to shape the ultimate US court for a generation.
"I have decided to nominate an inspiring woman who I believe will make a great justice, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the great state of New York," Obama said in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. The nomination of Sotomayor, 54, requires Senate confirmation, and if she is endorsed by the chamber, she will replace Justice David Souter, who is to retire next month.
Obama has spent days considering possible Supreme Court nominees and appears to have reached his final decision over the three-day Memorial Day weekend. Sotomayor's personal rise as a member of an ethnic minority from a poor childhood in the Bronx in New York, to the pinnacle of US justice, mirrors Obama's own storybook ascent to power.
The president had been under pressure to pick a woman and a minority, for a body that has been dominated by white males, with a few exceptions, for the bulk of US history. Hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee will be expected to take place in July to allow the full chamber to vote on Sotomayor's nomination to allow her to take up her seat at the start of the court's new term in October.
The nomination will set up a pitched political battle between Democrats backing Obama's nomination and Republicans and allied interest groups which will seek to torpedo it, and wound the new president in the process. Reaction to Sotomayor's nomination was swift. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee said Sotomayor's conduct and record had been "exemplary" and she had enjoyed a "long and distinguished career on the federal bench."
The Senate's top Republican Mitch McConnell promised fair treatment for Sotomayor, but vowed to "thoroughly examine her record" to ensure her personal political views would not stop her applying the law "even-handedly." Conservatives were quick to express their discontent. Cato Institute scholar Roger Pilon slammed Sotomayor as "the most radical of all the frequently mentioned candidates before" Obama.
"There will likely be an extremely contentious confirmation battle ahead," he said. Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, also hit out at the selection. "Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written," she said. "She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one's sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench."
Many experts expect however, that absent any personal or ethical revelations about Sotomayor, who has a liberal record on the bench, Democrats will prevail, given their large majority in the Senate. Princeton-educated Sotomayor, who hails from a Puerto Rican family, will be the second woman currently on the nine-judge panel, alongside Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She will be the first justice nominated since the Bush administration, following former president George W. Bush's picks of conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. The Supreme Court plays a vital role at the center of the rule of law in the United States, as one of the three branches of US government, and is the ultimate court of appeals and is the final arbiter of the US constitution.
Justices have lifetime tenure, though some retire through illness or due to old age or for family reasons. Divorced with no children, and with a reputation as a workaholic, Sotomayor often speaks of the courts as "the last refuge for the oppressed."
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