From Fox News:
Republican senators are starting to figure out how they will navigate the racial aspects of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, showing Sunday that they won't be tongue-tied when it comes to the politically tricky subject.
Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic on the high court if confirmed, and just the third woman, and Republicans don't want to appear insensitive to this historic significance during summer hearings.
Yet they cannot sidestep the issue. Sotomayor has assured that race will be an unavoidable topic of debate, with her now-infamous 2001 statement that a "wise Latina woman" would often reach a better conclusion than a white male.
Appearing on all five of the Sunday morning news shows, Republican senators followed a pattern in addressing such controversy.
-- They scolded sharp-tongued conservatives, like radio host Rush Limbaugh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for calling Sotomayor a "racist." The senators said such language is off limits and should not be used to describe an accomplished and respected jurist.
-- The senators nevertheless called Sotomayor's 2001 statement "troubling," and representative of a mindset that should be explored further during hearings. They also criticized her for ruling against a group of white firefighters who claimed the city of New Haven, Conn., discriminated against them by throwing out the results of a promotion exam after minority firefighters didn't score high enough.
-- Guarding against any criticism of racial insensitivity, Republican senators on Sunday tried to turn the table on Democrats. They repeatedly invoked the case of Miguel Estrada, President George W. Bush's 2001 nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals who withdrew his name after Democrats filibustered his nomination. Estrada was a Honduran immigrant.
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