Wash. Times' Curl reports that Sotomayor “looked at times as if she were on the verge of tears” during hearing

From Joseph Curl's July 14 Washington Times column:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, did not take a clear stand on the balls-and-strikes issue, but did bring up a bitter defeat for his party stretching all the way back to 2001.

“No Republican would have chosen you, judge, that's just the way it is,” he said to Judge Sotomayor, who looked at times as if she were on the verge of tears. “We would have picked Miguel Estrada,” a Honduran-born judge who was President George W. Bush's nominee for the Court of Appeals and became the first-ever appellate court hopeful blocked by a filibuster.

“He never had a chance to have this hearing,” Mr. Graham said before making two stark admissions -- that the nominee would be approved unless she had a “complete meltdown” and that the hearing “is mostly about liberal and conservative politics more than it is about anything else.”

Previously:

Fox's Kelly teases report on Sotomayor's “stone face”