Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama, little known to the country, will lead the charge against Obama’s Hispanic nominee, Sonia Sotomayor of New York

Editor’s Note: I would like to thank the Huffington Post investigative fund for partial funding for this story.

by Glynn Wilson

When the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes Monday, July 13 to begin advise and consent hearings on President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the United States Supreme Court, potentially the first Hispanic on the court, the American people will learn all there is to know about Sonia Sotomayor, an appeals court judge from New York who will most likely be confirmed to replace Justice David Souter. But they may not know a thing about the senator who is expected to enter the national limelight for the first time as the lead inquisitor in her confirmation, who faces grave political risks for his party if things are mishandled and go wrong.

Senator Jeff Sessions

Jefferson “Jeff” Beauregard Sessions III, the ranking minority Republican on the committee elevated by his colleagues to take the lead in questioning Ms. Sotomayor, is an Old South senator with an Old South name from the Deep South state of Alabama. He is an arch-conservative with a voting record ranked in the top five most conservative in the Senate by the National Review. He has voted consistently with a majority of his Republican colleagues 93 percent of the time, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Sessions has already indicated he will want to question Ms. Sotomayor on whether her empathy as a Hispanic from her time on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund will translate into favoritism or “activism” for certain groups. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich started that fight when he was quoted from a Twitter Tweet calling her a racist. Sessions will have to tread a fine line on the race issue since he was turned down for a federal judgeship in 1986 for making racist remarks himself — by the very Senate committee he now leads on the minority side. He called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American,” and he said the Ku Klux Klan boys were all right with him — until he found out they were “pot smokers,” according to testimony from his failed confirmation-hearing transcript.

That story will be told time and again over the next few days by the nation’s top newspapers, including the New York Times, on cable news and blogs all over the country. But it may not be the most important thing people need to know about the senator who is sitting in judgment on who will be allowed to serve on the nation’s highest court to shape the future of American law for a generation.

What they need to know is that Mr. Sessions has been on a crusade on the side of corporate America and against the rights of workers and juries for many years.

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