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If all goes as expected, the Senate Judiciary Committee will approve Sonia Sotomayor's nomination by the end of this month, the full Senate will approve it the first week in August and she will be on the Supreme Court in plenty of time for the fall term.
Gender and ethnicity aside, she is clearly qualified for the job by education and experience, and, after withstanding 583 questions in 15 hours over three days, Sotomayor proved herself unflappable and even pleasant under fire.
Senate Republicans reached a consensus that they would not try to block or delay the floor vote, meaning she needs only a simple majority for approval and not a 60 vote-plus supermajority. The newly sensible Republicans faced the reality that she would be approved in any case and that, whatever feathers might be ruffled in the GOP's far right, it was not worth further damaging the party's standing among Hispanics.
By the weekend she had picked up the support of Republican senators Richard Lugar, Ind., and Mel Martinez, Fla. That should be a bellwether for further bipartisan support. Lugar is the GOP's senior senator and Martinez its lone Hispanic senator.
What was striking about her hearing was how uninformative it was. Sotomayor refused to be drawn into debates over controversial issues like abortion, gun control, campaign finance, presidential powers, affirmative action and the death penalty. She refused to comment on unsettled issues because they might come before her on the court, and she wouldn't comment on others because they were settled law.
She would, she said, study the facts and apply the law as the law commands, the bare minimum requirement for a judge, one would think.
But the reality of these hearings, since Robert Bork's nomination crashed and burned in 1987, is such that Sotomayor, or any other nominee, would be crazy to be drawn into a substantive discussion. It's not partisan. Sotomayor was almost fulsome compared to Chief Justice John Roberts' 2005 confirmation hearing.
It is now established protocol that the nominee tries to be as noncommittal as possible while also trying to run out the clock on the committee. That makes little difference when the nominee, like Sotomayor with 17 years on the bench or Roberts, who was a respected appellate lawyer who had appeared 39 times before the Supreme Court, has long and detailed resumes.
But everybody in the Judiciary hearing room understood that this hearing was as much about the next nominee as about Sotomayor whose presence will not change the balance on the court. But President Obama's next nominee, if as is likely he gets another, will change the balance, flipping the current 5-4 majority. It would be worth knowing what that nominee thinks beyond a safe resort to precedents.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)