By Bob Morgan, Jr.

The nomination by President Obama of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court raises issues which are both familiar and perplexing.

There seems to be little doubt that Judge Sotomayor meets or exceeds the minimum professional qualifications required of a member of the Supreme Court. Having spent her early years in a public housing project, she was able to gain acceptance to both Princeton University and Yale Law School. She was a federal trial judge for six years and has been a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals since 1997. While on the Second Circuit, Ms. Sotomayor has generally been regarded as a solid, well prepared and competent jurist.

Rather, the issues surrounding Judge Sotomayor are much more ideological and philosophical. A statement that she made in 2001 expressing the hope "that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," is certainly troublesome. There does not seem to be much of a reason to assume such superiority and indeed by that measure the wisest justice on the current Supreme Court must surely be the conservative Clarence Thomas, a black man who endured significant poverty in his youth. Ms. Sotomayor's remarks seem like an odd thing for a potential Supreme Court justice to say.

Nor did Judge Sotomayor inspire much confidence in her impartiality by her decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, when she authored a terse opinion upholding the decision of a city to invalidate a written firefighter test solely on the ground that white applicants scored better than did black ones. This decision is very likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court. The plaintiff, Mr. Ricci, suffered from dyslexia and put enormous effort in passing the exam, only to have it thrown out. While President Obama has stressed the importance of "empathy" in a judge, the fear is that Ms. Sotomayor's empathy only runs in politically correct directions.

Nevertheless, Republicans in the Senate are in a quandary concerning Justice Sotomayor. Elections do have consequences, Mr. Obama won fair and square and he is entitled to pick a liberal Supreme Court justice, just as President George W. Bush was entitled to select conservative jurists like Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Moreover, Justice Sotomayor is replacing the liberal Justice David Souter, so she will not represent much of a change in the Court's ideological balance. And politically, Republicans can ill afford to alienate Hispanic voters, the fastest growing demographic segment of the electorate.

These issues are compounded for Republicans by the weak position they find themselves in the Senate, with just 40 members. Assuming that nothing truly damning comes out about the nominee during hearings (likely a good bet), the GOP's only serious shot of derailing the Sotomayor nomination, and not a very good shot at that, would be to mount a filibuster. This is problematic in that Republicans insisted that filibusters were not constitutionally permissible when directed at Mr. Bush's nominees and that it is unlikely that every Republican would support this tactic. (Another GOP problem is that a resolution of the Minnesota senate race in favor of Al Franken would give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority.)

Sonia Sotomayor may not be to the taste of many Republicans and conservatives, but they may have little choice but to educate the public about the consequence of activist judges, while waiting for a future battle where there may be better chances of success.