Monday at 10 a.m., the Senate Judiciary Committee starts its hearing on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Internet And the Confirmation Hearing

The Senate Judiciary Committee has made significant efforts to make this a public process. The witness list has been announced for Monday's hearing and for the remainder of the hearings, although we don't know who is scheduled to testify on particular days, and the full list of witnesses is not available on a separate page with its own permanent URL. The Committee's extensive questionnaire for the Judge and her responses, as well as related materials such as the Committee's letters regarding her nomination, have been published online.

In addition, the Committee will webcast the hearing live. As is usual practice, we should see the witnesses' written statements posted online as their testimony occurs -- the testimony has likely already been submitted, per the Committee's rules --  and we hope that the Committee will rush transcripts of their testimony as well.

Committee And Senate Rules Regarding Judicial Confirmation Hearings

For the Senate Judiciary Committee to issue its recommendation on confirmation to the Senate, a majority of the Committee must be present at the vote, and a majority of those present must vote to support the action taken. In other words, of the 19 Committee members (including newly elected Senator Al Franken, who replaced Sen. Ron Wyden on the Committee), a minimum of ten Senators must be present at the time the Committee votes on her nomination, with a majority (six, in this example) voting for the Committee's recommendation. Under the Committee's rules, at least two members of the minority party must be present for the Committee to conduct business.

A description of the Judiciary Committee's common practices regarding judicial nominations is available here. [Please note that the Committee has erroneously retained Sen. Wyden's biography on its page listing its members, although it removed him from its list of members. It has yet to add Sen. Franken's biography.]

Assuming the Committee votes to recommend Judge Sotomayor's confirmation, her nomination will be forwarded on to the full Senate for action. The nomination will be placed on the Senate's Executive Calendar for consideration. To confirm the nomination, a majority of the Senate is required to vote in favor. Were opponents of the nomination to attempt to filibuster - to debate indefinitely so as to kill the nomination (read more from CRS here) - 60 votes would be required to end the debate and proceed to a vote.

Moving Towards A Transparency Judicial Branch? Some Open Questions

Although debate on whether to confirm Judge Sotomayor will likely proceed along the usual political lines, it will be interesting to see whether she makes statements or faces questions on the issue of transparency, which has been much debated as it pertains to the Executive and Legislative branches.

Some basic questions regarding Judicial branch transparency practices could include:

• Would she support requiring the Supreme Court to place all of its decisions online, going back to the founding of the country? Those rulings, after all, are the law of the land. Currently, less than a decade's worth of decisions are made available on the Supreme Court's web site.

• Would she support placing all merits and certiorari briefs on the Supreme Court's web site, so that citizens can read all the arguments made before the Court, and not just the Court's final decisions? The Court does not make any of these briefs available on its web site now, and has asked the American Bar Association to publish the merits briefs on the ABA's web site.

• Would she support making available a contemporaneous transcript of the day's oral arguments, including audio recordings of the arguments? If so, would she agree to publish the recordings on the Court's website? Eventually, the National Archives releases audio recordings of arguments that took place before the Court, but not until the start of the next Term in October. However, on a few occasions, the Court has made audio of oral arguments available on the same day the arguments  took place. It could do so on a regular basis, and place those audio recordings on its web site.

• Would she advocate that the federal courts should make available online -- and at no charge -- all proceedings before the Court (filings, orders, opinions, etc.),  instead of the current PACER system which charges users to view these public documents?

The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted a completed questionnaire from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. You can see the whole, huge document here.

I'm pretty sure that this is only the second time that the Committee has posted a completed questionnaire on their web site.

Today's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court will set off the usual partisan bromides about judicial activists, up or down votes, and filibusters. Missing in the exclamatory punctuations of the paid political muppets on television is a background on judicial nominations to help you understand the process. What do you need to know about the process? I'll try to answer that below.

The key player that you need to follow is the Senate Judiciary Committee. Once the President nominates someone to a federal court -- in this case, Sotomayor -- they must go through a confirmation process that begins in the Judiciary Committee. The committee consists of 12 Democrats and 7 Republicans, making a successful confirmation hearing highly likely.

The Judiciary Committee has not always been the central player in judicial nominations that it is is now. In the early- to mid-19th century, the role of committees, and even their permanence, was ill-defined. The Judiciary Committee only received one out of three judicial nominations; the rest were approved solely by the full Senate. In 1868, as the committee structure became more normalized and entrenched, the committee began to receive nearly all Supreme Court nominees. Despite the move to involve the committee in most every Supreme Court nomination, the committee did not receive testimony from a nominee until 1925. That year, Harlan Stone, then Attorney General, was invited to give testimony about the prosecution of the Teapot Dome scandal and questions raised by a senator opposed to his nomination about Stone's connections to J.P. Morgan. Testimony was still not a regular, or required, path for a nominee to take before the committee until 1955 when President Eisenhower nominated John Harlan to the Court. Every nominee since John Harlan has faced the questions of the committee in live testimony.

The current committee members include Chair Pat Leahy and current Ranking Member Jeff Sessions. In many ways, they represent the partisan and increasingly regional divide within the nation and between the two major parties. Leahy is a liberal New Englander, hailing from Vermont; the Alabaman Sessions is a conservative Southerner. The rest of the committee also shows a regional divide between the parties with the Democrats dominated by senators elected from  states in the North East/Mid-Atlantic (5 members) and the Great Lakes/Mid-West (4 members), as the Republicans are largely dominated by Southerners (4 members). Only one committee member, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, comes from a state that his party's 2008 presidential nominee did not win (Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 9% in Iowa).

While there is little doubt that Sotomayor will make it out of the Judiciary Committee, the process requires a vote of support or opposition for her confirmation by the full Senate. Instead of terminating a nomination in the committee through a vote, the committee instead votes their support and then reports the nomination to the floor for a full vote. There are three options for the committee, report the nominee with a favorable recommendation, report with an unfavorable recommendation, or report with no recommendation. The committee could also refuse to report a nomination, however this has usually only occurred after a nominee has withdrawn from consideration.

In the full Senate, a nominee must overcome a cloture vote prior to a final vote. Cloture, which has largely become a stand-in for filibustering, requires a 60 vote, or three-fifths, majority. This means that a minority of 41 senators could block a judicial nomination. Achieving this number would be unlikely given Democrats hold a 59-40 partisan edge (with the 100th senator waiting to be decided by the Minnesota Supreme Court). After a successfull cloture vote, the nominee would then face a final, simple majority vote.

While this is the ordinary route for a Supreme Court nominee to take, sometimes a nomination gets derailed before the engine gets going. Some nominees simply withdraw after poiltically embarrassing details emerge, as in the case of Douglas Ginsberg after it was revealed that he smoked marijuana with his law school students. Other nominees, like Harriet Miers, withdraw due to political pressure (in Miers' case, pressure from within her own party).

For an even more detailed look at the history and process involved in the selection and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice (or what my friend and colleague Tim Ball calls 1/27th of the government), check out these two excellent Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports and this Open Congress Wiki page on Senate nominations:

• Supreme Court Appointment Process: Roles of the President, Judiciary Committee, and Senate
• Supreme Court Nominations, 1789 - 2006
• U.S. Senate Confirmation Process