Sotomayor Battle Begins With Senate Meetings This Week

Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation begins Tuesday.

Not her formal hearing, that will be held later in the summer. Rather, President Obama's selection to the Supreme Court will start the more informal but important private meetings with the senators who will ultimately vote on her confirmation.

On Tuesday, Sotomayor is expected to visit top senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the panel's top Republican.

In some pre-game movement, Sotomayor met at the White House on Monday with administration lawyers who are working on her confirmation. White House aides said Sotomayor was finalizing the answers to her Senate questionnaire and getting ready for the meetings with senators.

Constitutional interpretation, judicial temperament and gay rights are all areas of inquiry sure to come up in these closed doors meetings. It's also possible she will be asked about a controversial comment she made related to Justice Clarence Thomas.

But these are all matters Sotomayor has already answered in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will conduct her confirmation hearing this summer.

She has twice before survived Senate scrutiny. Sotomayor was approved as a federal trial judge in 1992 and faced the committee again when she was elevated to her current post on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in 1997.

That second confirmation hearing offers a preview of what we can expect when she appears before the committee later this year.

The spotlight will also shine on two men who figured prominently in Sotomayor's last go around: Leahy and Sessions, who just recently ascended to the top Republican seat on the panel.

The duo are seasoned warriors with battle scars from scores of confirmation battles but their handling of this nomination, from a new president almost assured of at least one more high court selection, will almost certainly lay a new foundation for the level of inquiry that is expected for a Supreme Court nominee