President Obama talks with Sonia Sotomayor on the phone Sunday. Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings begin today. (Credit: White House)

• "Just back from his trip abroad, President Obama called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on Sunday to wish her luck," The Hill reports.

• The hearings, which begin today, are "only partly about the fate of Sotomayor's nomination, as both sides predict she will win confirmation easily," the Washington Post reports. "The battle over" Obama's "first court nominee is also likely to have broad and long-lasting political implications for the president and both political parties."

• The Post also reports on five senators to watch during the hearings.

• "When a national television audience tunes in to the Senate hearings... it will get a crash course in the law beginning with the perennial three R's: race, religion and Roe," USA Today reports.

• "A nearly century-old battle over what questions can be asked and answered likely will continue with undiminished fervor," the National Law Journal reports. "This battle triggers repeated complaints that the hearings are meaningless or useless because nominees and their supporters on the Senate Judiciary Committee use the shield of judicial ethics to fend off substantive questions by other senators."

• On Sunday, "Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled... that they would question" Sotomayor's "ability to be impartial, based on previous statements she has made about her background," the New York Times reports.

• "Opponents of" Sotomayor's confirmation "suggested they would consider it a victory if more than half of the Senate's 40 Republicans voted against her in this week's confirmation hearing, as the GOP grapples with how aggressively to challenge the nominee," the Wall Street Journal reports.

• AP profiles LatinoJustice PRLDEF and examines Sotomayor's prior involvement in the organization.

Commentary

• If Sotomayor "keeps her cool and her answers earnestly and learnedly vague, she is a shoo-in -- and perhaps 10 of 40 Republicans will vote for her," Howard Fineman predicts.

• Eva Rodriguez speculates on what topics will be on the front burner during the hearings. "National security, terrorism, executive power and, of course, affirmative action and civil rights are likely to take a leading role."

• Several New York Times correspondents also weigh in on what topics will receive attention.

• The Times also asks outside experts about what questions they would like to see Sotomayor answer. Experts include Stanford law professor Kathleen Sullivan and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

• "If Sotomayor can credibly make a case for her fealty to the Constitution, then senators should vote for her," the Washington Examiner writes. "The problem is that it seems impossible to reconcile anything she might say with her many statements throughout her career to the contrary."

• Sotomayor's hearings "represent the opening skirmish in a long-term struggle to challenge the escalating activism of an increasingly conservative judiciary," E. J. Dionne contends.

• On the Huffington Post, lawyer Stephen Kaus expresses his support for Sotomayor's ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano and argues that, despite the high court majority reversing that decision, she "is in line with four of the nine current members of the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not she who is starting a race war."