July 29 (Bloomberg) -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court is on course for Senate confirmation with meager Republican support.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination yesterday, 13-6, with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican to join the panel’s 12 Democrats in voting for her. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the Democratic-controlled Senate will hold a confirmation vote next week “before we leave here” for the August congressional recess.

Sotomayor, 55, is President Barack Obama’s first high court nominee, picked to replace Justice David Souter, who retired at the conclusion of the court’s term last month. She would join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the court and the third in its history.

“America has changed for the better with her selection,” Graham said at yesterday’s Judiciary Committee meeting. He said she is “left of center but well within the mainstream of legal thinking.”

Sotomayor, if confirmed as the 111th justice in U.S. history, would be only the fifth who isn’t a white male.

Democrats control the Senate 60-40, ensuring Sotomayor’s confirmation to the lifetime position. In addition to Graham, four other Republicans have said they will vote for Sotomayor: Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Mel Martinez of Florida.

Historic Choice

Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, said Sotomayor is a historic choice and a uniquely qualified one.

“She is a restrained, fair and impartial judge,” Leahy said. “There is not one example, let alone a pattern, of a ruling based on prejudice, bias or sympathy.” He said she has more federal judicial experience than any high court nominee in about 100 years.

Sotomayor has been a federal trial and appeals court judge in New York for 17 years.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s ranking Republican, said he is concerned Sotomayor won’t separate her personal beliefs from her judicial rulings.

“In speech after speech, year after year, she set forth a judicial philosophy that conflicts with blind justice and fidelity to the law,” Sessions said.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee objected to a series of speeches she has made in which she discussed the role of race and gender.

‘Wise Latina’

In one speech, Sotomayor said a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences” would make better decisions on the bench “than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

During her confirmation hearing earlier this month, Sotomayor said the statement was a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.”

Her explanation didn’t satisfy most Republicans, including Sessions, who said she failed to reconcile her record as a judge with her public statements.

“I don’t believe that Judge Sotomayor has the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism,” Sessions wrote in an opinion piece in USA Today prior to yesterday’s committee meeting.

“I think it’s a pretty healthy thing to have a little ethnic pride,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said yesterday in defense of her “wise Latina” comment. Specter switched parties this year, from Republican to Democrat.

New Haven Firefighters

Republicans also attacked some of Sotomayor’s rulings, particularly a decision by a three-judge appeals panel on which she served. The panel rejected a claim by white New Haven, Connecticut, firefighters who said they were victims of reverse discrimination when New Haven scrapped a promotion test after black firefighters who took the exam failed to qualify for advancement.

The Supreme Court, voting 5-4, overturned Sotomayor’s decision in June, ruling that New Haven improperly used race as a basis to throw out the test results.

Sotomayor was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents who moved to the U.S. after World War II. She attended Princeton University in New Jersey on a scholarship and graduated in 1976 with honors. She went on to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, before becoming a prosecutor in New York and later a corporate lawyer.

Sotomayor was nominated by Republican President George H.W. Bush to be a federal trial judge in 1992. In 1998 she was elevated to the appeals court in New York by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

In the two most recent previous high court nominations -- both by Republican George W. Bush -- John Roberts got 22 votes from the Senate’s 44 minority Democrats when he became chief justice in 2005, and Samuel Alito received only four Democratic votes the following year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Stern in Washington at cstern3@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 29, 2009 00:01 EDT