Sotomayor hearings set for July 13
The Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor will begin on July 13, MSNBC just reported.
More to come…
UPDATE: Erica Chabot, a spokesman for Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), just confirmed MSNBC’s report. Leahy also just said the start date will be July 13 on the Senate floor.
This will undoubtedly be welcome news for the White House, who wanted Sotomayor to be confirmed before the August recess.
UPDATE 2: In that statement on the Senate floor, Leahy said the timeline for Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing closely follows that of John Roberts.
“This is a schedule that tracks the process the Senate followed by bipartisan agreement in considering President Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court in 2005,” Leahy said. “That agreement was reached before the Committee received the answers to the bipartisan questionnaire, and before the Committee had received any of the 75,000 pages of documents from his years working in Republican administrations. If 48 days were sufficient to prepare for that hearing, in accordance with our agreement and the initial schedule, it is certainly adequate time to prepare for the confirmation hearing for Judge Sotomayor.”
Leahy also pointed out that Roberts was confirmed 72 days after being announced as the nominee. If the Senate adheres to the schedule, Sotomayor would be confirmed on August 6, before the August recess as Obama has requested.
Leahy also provided this breakdown comparing the Sotoamyor scheduled to Roberts’s.
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