SENATOR: THIS IS MOSTLY ABOUT LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE POLITICS

Starting off by telling her that “no Republican would have chosen you,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham offered some harsh criticism for the woman who could be the next Supreme Court justice.

During the first day of hearings Monday before the Judiciary Committee into the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who would become the first Hispanic judge in Supreme Court history, Graham said he was undecided as to how he would vote and that he has some serious concerns.

“The Hispanic element of this hearing’s important, but I don’t want it to be lost that this is mostly about liberal and conservative politics more than it is anything else,” Graham said, referencing Judge Miguel Estrada’s failed 2001 nomination to the DC Court of Appeals. “And — and my Republican colleagues who vote against you I assure you could vote for a Hispanic nominee.

“They just feel unnerved by your speeches and by some of the things that you’ve said and some of your cases.”

Particularly, Graham pointed out Sotomayor’s work with a Puerto Rican defense legal fund that he said “advocated taxpayer-funded abortion and said in a brief that to deny a poor black woman Medicaid funding for an abortion was equivalent to the Dred Scott case.”

Said Graham, “To take my taxpayer dollars and provide an abortion to — to pay for abortion I disagree with is pretty extreme. I just want my colleagues to understand that there can be no more liberal group, in my opinion, than the Puerto Rican defense legal fund when it came to advocacy.”

The state’s senior senator also grilled Sotomayor for a comment she has repeatedly made that a wise Latina woman could make a better decision than a white man.

“If I had said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over,” said Graham. “That’s true of most people here. And you need to understand that.”

The undecided Graham also gave a little insight into how he may vote on Sotomayor.

“I can assure you that if I applied Senator Obama’s standard to your nomination, you — I wouldn’t vote for you, because the standard that he articulated would make it impossible for anybody with my view of the law and society to vote for someone with your activism and background when it comes to lawyering and judging. “