Thread: McCon. time needed review new Sotomayor material/300 boxes

http://www.drudgereport.com/

I just saw this link on the Drudge Report. Three hundred more boxes of material... what will they find.




McConnell Says Time Needed to Review New Sotomayor Material
June 28, 2009, 11:48 a.m.
By Tory Newmyer
Roll Call Staff

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday said the Senate needs more time to review the record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor after new material surfaced from her time with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“Just a day or so ago, we discovered that there are 300 or so boxes of additional material that has just been discovered from her time working with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund,â€

What does the PRLDF do?

Nominee’s Links With Advocates Fuel Her Critics
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and DAVID W. CHEN
In the 1980s, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the New York City Police Department, claiming that its promotion exams discriminated against Latinos and African-Americans.

The fund, one of the advocacy groups pressing similar cases across the country, also helped redraw voting districts in the city that increased the number of Hispanic elected officials. The defense fund even sued a former Reagan administration official for defamation after he claimed that virtually all Puerto Ricans in New York received food stamps.

All those efforts were backed by the defense fund’s board of directors, an active and passionate group that included a young lawyer named Sonia Sotomayor, who this week was chosen by President Obama to join the country’s highest court.

Ms. Sotomayor’s involvement with the defense fund has so far received scant attention. But her critics, including some Republican senators who will vote on her nomination, have questioned whether she has let her ethnicity, life experiences and public advocacy creep into her decisions as a judge. It seems inevitable, then, that her tenure with the defense fund will be scrutinized during her confirmation hearings.

Curt Levey, executive director of Committee for Justice, a conservative legal group active in judicial nominations, said that “while it’s fine to let your Puerto Rican heritage influence — or any heritage for that matter — influence your positions when you’re on a board, it’s quite a different story when you’re a judge, and I wonder whether she knows the difference.â€

GOP leader says time needed for Sotomayor records

The Associated Press
Sunday, June 28, 2009 4:55 PM



WASHINGTON -- Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday the committee preparing for hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor needs time to review 300 boxes of records that recently turned up in connection with her work for a legal advocacy group.

McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to examine the materials from the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF. Hearings are scheduled to begin July 13 on President Barack Obama's nomination of Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge.

"The committee needs to have access to that material and time to work through it so we don't - so we know all the facts before we vote on a person who's up for a lifetime job," McConnell said on "Fox News Sunday."

Republicans have complained that the hearings for Sotomayor are taking place too soon. Democrats say the schedule is in keeping with hearings for recent Supreme Court nominees.

On Friday, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, wrote to Sotomayor to request additional information related to her career as a lawyer, prosecutor and judge.

In the letter, Sessions noted that he had been in contact with counsel for the PRLDEF and that the group's archives contained more than 300 boxes of material that Sotomayor's representatives were searching in connection with her nomination.

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