The Mother Jones article in the link below gives some interesting history of Sotomayor's confirmation to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998. Jeff Sessions and others on the Senate Judicial Committee voted FOR her confirmation, with the committee vote going 16-2. But then things got really political:
"Senate Republican staff aides said Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, has agreed to hold up a vote on the nomination as part of an elaborate political calculus; if she were easily confirmed to the appeals court, they said, that would put her in a position to be named to the Supreme Court. And Senate Republicans think that they would then have a difficult time opposing a Hispanic woman who had just been confirmed by the full Senate."
Sessions and other Republicans who had voted for her in committee then changed their votes to avoid the "difficult time" envisioned by Trent Lott, noted racist. You will remember that Lott lost his majority leader position in large measure because of his inane racist comment at the time of Strom Thurmond's passing: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." He was referring, or course, to the 1948 presidential election when Thurmond ran on the unabashedly segregationist "Dixiecrat" ticket.
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