The next Supreme Court justice

Despite the Senate theatrics and the right-wing hysterics, it's all but certain that Sonia Sotomayor will become the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

So much has been written already about her historic nomination that I hesitate to add to it. So I'll let it go at this. Here are two of the more intelligent commentaries I've read in recent days -- one from the liberal Marie Cocco of The Washington Post, the other from the conservative David Brooks of The New York Times.

Cocco, in "Empathy beyond the beltway," takes on Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who said he won't vote for a judge who uses the "empathy standard" in deciding cases -- "a reference to the sensitivity toward average people that President Obama said he looked for in nominees, and which has been transformed by the political right into code for favoring blacks or other ethnic minorities over whites."

Cocco writes:

This is the key to understanding the unhinged argument about "empathy." It presumes that the white male experience is the only authentically American experience, and therefore the only one that could possibly be unbiased.

Brooks, in "The Way We Live Now," takes a different tack in looking at the personal sacrifices Sotomayor, a classic workaholic, has made enroute to the top.

(H)er biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. "You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule," a friend of hers told The Times. This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women ... It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

Can't wait until the nomination hearings are over and Sonia is confirmed. Six months after seeing our first black president sworn in, the political right is just going to have to get used to seeing a wise brown woman's face on the bench.

Photograph by Mario Tama, Getty Images