This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor continue on Capitol Hill with just a few missteps along the way, like for example misstating key facts in the most

important takings case in decades.

That according to Ilia Shapiro, editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review.

This is the Super Bowl for us legal policy

Wongs. This is what we've been training for all season.

And it's been an interesting three-ring circus as these things tend to be.

The first day was kind of dull with all the different senators bloviating in their own separate ways, although a little bit less of that now

that Joe Biden is no longer on the committee.

Lindsey Graham has shown himself to be the star attraction, I think, on the Republican Republican side both in his opening statement

when he said that unless she had a complete meltdown she'd be confirmed and

also in his questioning asking her the direct question of well there's all these

allegations of your of your bad temperament and reading them off you know what do you

think about that I wasn't expecting her temperament to be questioned in that way rather than got

at indirectly to see how poise should be in the committee. But generally I think the

Republicans have stuck to their game plan of targeting her greatest weaknesses which are the wise Latina

comment, Reitchie versus the Stefano, the firefighters case, property rights in

Kilo, a lot of questioning on abortion and where she exactly stands there.

Use of foreign law, all of these different things that have been unearthed more from her speeches really than her writings than her judicial

opinions that the two big judicial opinions being Ricci and and didn't the

property rights case.

But she's sticking to her game plan as well,

talking slowly and deliberately, giving fairly complete answers,

...