Confirmed: 68-31 Senate vote sends Sotomayor to high court

WASHINGTON — Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, a history-making Senate vote that capped a summer-long debate heavy with ethnic politics and hints of high court fights to come.

The third woman in court history, she'll be sworn in Saturday as the 111th justice and the first nominated by a Democrat in 15 years.

The Senate vote was 68-31 to confirm Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, with Democrats unanimously behind her but most Republicans lining up in a show of opposition both for her and for the president's standards for a justice.

Republican Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett both voted against confirmation.

Sotomayor, the 55-year-old daughter of Puerto Rican parents, was raised in a South Bronx housing project and educated in the Ivy League before rising to the highest legal echelons, spending the past 17 years as a federal judge. She watched the vote on TV at a federal courthouse in New York City, among friends and colleagues.

Republicans argued she'd bring personal bias and a liberal agenda to the bench. But Democrats praised Sotomayor as an extraordinarily qualified mainstream moderate with more years as a judge than any current justice had when nominated — and solid experience as a prosecutor before that.

Obama, the nation's first black president, praised the Senate's vote as "breaking another barrier and moving us yet another step closer to a more perfect union." He planned to welcome Sotomayor at the White House next week.

Minutes before the vote, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee chairman, called it one for the ages. "Years from now … we will remember this time when we crossed paths with the quintessentially American journey of Sonia Sotomayor."

Senators took the rare step of assembling at their desks for the vote, rising from their seats to call out "aye" or "nay." The longest-serving senator, 91-year-old Robert Byrd of West Virginia who has been in frail health following a long hospitalization, was brought in in a wheelchair to vote in Sotomayor's favor. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., suffering from brain cancer, was the only senator absent.

Sotomayor replaces retiring Justice David Souter, a liberal named by a Republican president, and she is not expected to alter the court's ideological split.