WASHINGTON — Acknowledging that it will be difficult to defeat the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Republicans in the Senate and beyond Capitol Hill are looking for other strategies to gain political yardage in the debate over President Obama's pick.
They are spotlighting her decisions on wedge issues such as gun rights that could put pressure on Democrats from conservative states. And they are preparing for confirmation hearings that they hope will spotlight major differences between the political parties' legal philosophies.
With Democrats controlling a commanding 59 seats in the 100-member Senate, about all the GOP could do to block the nomination would be to mount a filibuster, although the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee has downplayed that possibility.
Even conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh seemed resigned to Sotomayor's confirmation. "The odds that she could be stopped are long," Limbaugh said.
But other conservative activists see lines of attack that would make a filibuster unnecessary: They aim to paint a portrait of Sotomayor to make conservative Democrats squirm, eroding support from within Obama's party.
That is what's happened to Dawn Johnsen, Obama's choice to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, whose confirmation has stalled because of her past legal work for a major abortion rights group.
Conservatives see another precedent for defeating a nominee without a filibuster: President George W. Bush's decision to withdraw the nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court, under pressure from Republicans who said she was not up to the job.
For now, however, Republicans in the Senate are taking a deliberate wait-and-see approach. Sotomayor called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday and promised to meet with him. In the meantime, teams of GOP lawyers started poring over the hundreds of opinions and speeches in Sotomayor's long paper trail.
Conservative critics are already spotlighting a ruling by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, including Sotomayor, that found that the 2nd Amendment's protection of citizens' gun rights did not apply to state or local regulations. She and her fellow judges argued that the Supreme Court did not resolve that question when it decided last year that the 2nd Amendment applied in the District of Columbia, a federal city.
