Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled anew Friday that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be questioned about lawsuits charging racial bias during her tenure on the board of a Latino legal advocacy group.
But her critics are likely to find little new ammunition in a batch of documents released Friday by LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the advocacy group known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) during Sotomayor's affiliation with it.
The 71 documents, totaling hundreds of pages, released by the Senate Judiciary Committee, cover the period between 1980 to 1992 when Sotomayor was a board member of PRLDEF.
The organization searched its files under a joint request of committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Republicans made clear they still intend to make Sotomayor's involvement in PRLDEF a focus of their inquiry when her confirmation is scheduled to begin on July 13.
In particular, Republicans are seeking to tie lawsuits in which PRLDEF was involved to a Supreme Court decision this week overturning a reverse discrimination opinion Sotomayor participated in as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
A Senate Judiciary GOP statement released Friday noted Sotomayor chaired PRLDEF's litigation committee in 1987, when it was involved in a trio of lawsuits against New York City agencies charging their promotion exams had a discriminatory impact on minority candidates.
Leahy said in a statement that the documents fulfill the committee's request for additional information.
"The receipt of these documents is timely, and appears to be complete and responsive to the request for additional information, materials not called for in the bipartisan committee questionnaire submitted by Judge Sotomayor," he said.
The documents released Friday include court filings and internal summaries of those cases but nothing Sotomayor wrote about them or other documents that indicated she played any role in the litigation.
The only documentation of her role as chairwoman of PRLDEF's litigation committee are minutes from board meetings in 1987 where she describes efforts to obtain access for the group's lawyers to the legal database Lexis Nexis and studying the legal department's structure.
After an earlier release of documents on July 1, committee Republicans suggested those were just the "tip of the iceberg" and show that she played "a substantive role" in the group.
But in a letter Thursday, White House counsel Gregory Craig told Sessions that Sotomayor has already provided the committee with all relevant documents related to her involvement with the group.
Craig said Republicans are seeking documents "that were not written, edited, reviewed or approved by Judge Sotomayor."
