The First Senora Juez

In the third week of July, the nation will hear a debate on whether the Founding Fathers intended to grant Americans the personal right to bear nunchaku.

This critical constitutional question will take place during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.

So far there are few serious objections to Sotomayor's personal or judicial qualifications, so conservative opponents to President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee will hone in on hot-button issues that can help their political cause.

Nothing does that so well as perceived threats to the Second Amendment. As a federal district court and appellate court judge in New York, Sotomayor hasn't ruled against guns, but she did cast a vote this year upholding New York state's ban on possession of nunchaku, an Okinawan martial arts weapon sometimes known as "nunchucks" or chuka sticks.

This, sadly, is where we are in the proud history of the Advice and Consent clause of the Constitution: A president's judicial nominees, and especially his nominees to the Supreme Court, must run an ideological gauntlet designed by partisan groups for the benefit of partisan groups. The qualities that make for a good judge — personal and judicial experience, temperament, intellectual rigor and consistency — come second.

There is little doubt that Sonia Sotomayor, 54, qualifies. But in introducing her Tuesday, Obama stressed her bulletproof compelling personal narrative: Her working-class roots, her scholarships to Princeton and Yale Law School, her career as a prosecutor and corporate lawyer.

It was an affirming moment for American evolution: Fifty years ago, who would believed that an African-American president would stand next to his Catholic vice president to nominate the first Latina to the Supreme Court?

The demographics are correct for a changing America, but Obama went beyond them in seeking a nominee.

Indeed, in her judicial rulings, Sotomayor seems to reflect Obama's own readings of the law — generally liberal and expansive, but with a careful recognition of precedent.

Obama, a former teacher of constitutional law, knew better than most presidents what he was looking for: "First and foremost ... a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on key issues. ... Second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role ... that a judge's job is to interpret, not make law."

Beyond that, he said a justice needs an "experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live."

This latter philosophy was not what President George W. Bush sought in nominating Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the court. They hold that the law governs irrespective of how the world works or how ordinary people live. Both philosophies are legitimate and worth debating, but this is not the debate we will have in July.

Conservative organizations have acknowledged that Democrats and moderate Republicans have enough votes to confirm Sotomayor, but that they will fight the nomination anyway. The Sotomayor hearings will be used by Republicans in the same way that Democrats used the Roberts and Alito hearings: to mobilize their base and raise money for the next election.

For that reason, we await the hearings with some dread, but we say of Sotomayor what we said of Roberts: The appointee has had a long and distinguished legal career (and is) undeniably, professionally and temperamentally suited to the job.

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