Dealing from the bottom of the deck

The race card can be played from both sides of the table.

Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions can point to Sonia Sotomayor saying in 2001 that she hoped that a "wise Latina" would make a better decision than a white male who did not have the same life experiences. And he's done that.

Democrats could point out that Sessions was once blocked from the federal bench two decades ago for making insensitive remarks about the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP. But they haven't.

Nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the federal bench, Sessions, then a federal prosecutor, was attacked by liberals for "gross insensitivity" on matters of race. Notably, he once reportedly joked that the KKK wouldn't be so bad but for its members' use of marijuana. The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, he allegedly said, were communist-inspired and tried to force civil rights down people's throats.

Sessions' nomination never made it to the Senate floor. His home-state senator, the late Howell Heflin, voted against him.

-Ron Fournier, AP Washington bureau chief, and Laurie Kellman, AP reporter, Congress