WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor won a public pledge of support from Maine U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe on Friday.
Snowe, Maine's senior Republican senator, said she plans to vote to confirm Sotomayor to the high court when the full Senate takes up her nomination.
Snowe met with Sotomayor in June and said she was impressed with the responses she gave during her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
"I was pleased that Judge Sotomayor repeatedly recognized in her responses this week that 'the job of a judge is to apply the law' rather than independently make policy, and that it is the law, rather than one's own sympathies that 'compels conclusions in cases,' " Snowe said in a statement.
Snowe also met with President Obama in May, before Sotomayor's nomination was announced, and urged him to select a woman for the court.
Two other centrist Republicans also announced they'd support Sotomayor even as the Senate's minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he'd vote no.
GOP Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Senate's most senior Republican, and Mel Martinez of Florida, its lone Hispanic Republican, announced they'd vote for Sotomayor, praising her qualifications and her testimony at four days of hearings this week that placed her on track to become the high court's first Latina and the first Democratic-named justice in 15 years.
McConnell planned a speech Monday in which he'll say the judge's past statements demonstrate an "alarming lack of respect for the notion of equal justice," and question her ability to separate her sympathies and prejudices from her decisions.
McConnell joins other GOP conservatives who are lining up against Sotomayor, including Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, who announced Friday that he'll vote no, citing her position on gun rights and comments he said indicate "a tendency toward judicial activism."
But with solid backing from Democrats, who enjoy a lopsided majority, and a growing number of Republicans, there's little doubt that the judge will be confirmed as the 111th Supreme Court justice.
Republicans have said they won't try to block or even delay a vote to confirm her, which is expected in early August.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said Thursday that neither he nor any GOP senator he knows of is interested in holding up the vote. The panel is likely to cast the first votes on Sotomayor's nomination in late July, although Democrats were pushing for a committee vote as soon as Tuesday.
Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a member of the committee who had hinted strongly that he would support Sotomayor, made it official Friday with a statement in which he said he'd vote for her and urge colleagues to do the same.
Three days of questioning before the Judiciary panel gave Republicans no new ammunition to use against the nominee, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who was raised in a South Bronx housing project, educated in the Ivy League, and rose to spend 17 years on the federal bench.
Two Republicans on the committee, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, came away calling most of her judicial record "mainstream," although both said her rulings were at odds with her past comments.
Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- who created a stir and political difficulties for his party by suggesting a remark by Sotomayor was "racist" shortly after she was nominated -- acknowledged Friday that she came across in the hearings as "dramatically more moderate" than she had before.
Bennett, Lugar and Snowe are among the current GOP senators who voted for Sotomayor when she was confirmed to New York's 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 1998. The others were Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Susan Collins of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Orrin Hatch of Utah.
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