Obama's Supreme Court pick today

by Mark Silva and updated

The president's decks are cleared for his Supreme Court nomination today, following a Memorial Day weekend that included a retreat with his family at Camp David and four-and-a-half hours of golf at Fort Belvoir on Monday afternoon - a lot of time to think, between telephone calls with the leaders of South Korea, Japan and others involved in the newest crisis surrounding North Korea's apparent nuclear test and repeated launches of missiles that carried into today.

The AP and CNN are reporting that Obama wll name Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appellate judge in New York who could become the first Hispanic justice on the high court.

The president leaves for Las Vegas this evening, to headline a fundraiser that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is staging at the Colloseum, so this is a great day for news -- though heavy rain besieging Washington today puts the Rose Garden out of commission.

. And watch for a judge who, as Obama said in an interview aired over the weekend, has "a common touch.''

"I want somebody who, obviously, has a clear sense of our Constitution and its history and is committed to fidelity to the law... is going to make their decisions based on the law that's in front of them,'' Obama said in his interview with C-SPAN aired several times over the weekend. "But as I've said before, I think it's also important that this is somebody who has common sense and somebody who has a sense of how American society works and how the American people live. And you know, I said earlier that I thought empathy wasn't important quality and I continue to believe that.

"You have to have not only the intellect to be able to effectively apply the law to cases before you,'' the president said. "But you have to be able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes and get a sense of how the law might work or not work in practical day-to-day living.''

The final four were said to be Diane Wood, a member of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, Sonia Sotomayor, member of the Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, Elena Kagan, the president's own solicitor general, and Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona. Sotomayor could fit two bills: Not only a woman, for a court of nine that includes only one woman today, but also a Hispanic, for a court that lacks one. Kagan has the advantage of already having cleared one confirmation by the Senate, as does Napolitano, though she, like Sotomayor, is likely to draw a greater measure of political controversy than the others.