• Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Tuesday that "he did not expect" the Supreme Court's reversal of the Second Circuit's Ricci v. DeStefano case "to play a significant part in his decision-making about" Sonia Sotomayor's "fitness to serve on the nation's high court," the Des Moines Register reports.
• Incoming Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., "said he had been told his assignments would include the Judiciary Committee, a role that would put him immediately in the thick of confirmation hearings over" Sotomayor, AP reports.
• "Latino Justice PRLDEF sent the" Senate Judiciary Committee late Tuesday "more than 350 pages of documents from the 12 years Sotomayor spent on its board, opening what could be an ugly new chapter in the debate over confirming the federal appeals court judge as the first Hispanic justice," AP also reports.
• On Tuesday, "the left-leaning Alliance for Justice issued its fourth and final report analyzing" Sotomayor's opinions, NationalJournal.com reports. "The group saved the most controversial cases for last, focusing this time on Sotomayor's constitutional and civil decisions, including Ricci, the gun rights case Maloney v. Cuomo, the voting rights case Hayden v. Pataki and a handful of decisions touching on the issue of abortion."
• "The Supreme Court's unusual order Monday delaying a decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and setting it for re-argument Sept. 9 may introduce more pressure on the Senate to confirm" Sotomayor "and have her on the bench by then," the Blog of Legal Times reports.
• The Washington Post reviews the Supreme Court's term and previews the next.
• Sotomayor's "record on the federal appeals court in New York suggests that her views are largely in sync with those of" outgoing Justice David Souter, "though there is some evidence that she will turn out to be more conservative in criminal cases," the New York Times reports in its end-of-term analysis.
Commentary
• Clarence Page supports Sotomayor's confirmation, but he sees critics' arguments regarding the New Haven, Conn., firefighters case. He is "eager to hear Judge Sotomayor face the questions that surely will come up about the Ricci case during her confirmation hearing."
• If the Supreme Court's ruling on the Second Circuit's Ricci decision "says anything about Judge Sotomayor... it underscores the reasonableness of her views," the New York Times maintains.
• The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci "is very good news," Abigail Thernstrom, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, writes in the Wall Street Journal. "The court said clearly and decisively that employment law only rarely permits quotas to remedy racial imbalance."
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