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A funny thing happened on Sotomayor's way to Washington

By JESSE J. HOLLAND

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — A funny thing happened on Sonia Sotomayor’s drive to Washington to be announced as President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee: She got lost.

The Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice told C-SPAN that a friend drove her from New York City to the District of Columbia the night before her appearance at the White House with Obama. She was furiously working on her speech during what is normally a four-hour drive when a torrential rainstorm enveloped the highway.

“It knocked out our GPS, and so we got lost,” she said. “And all of sudden I’m in Virginia and looking up because I had been scrambling on the piece of paper — scribbling on the piece of paper and making changes and all of a sudden I look up and I look at my friend and say, 'Tom, we’re not going into Washington, we’re going away from Washington, we’d better stop.' So we pulled over on a road and I started calling up a friend and saying please get on the computer and figure out how we get back to where we have to go.”

One of her law clerks who was originally from Washington eventually got them headed them back in the right direction, and they arrived in the District of Columbia about 2:30 a.m., Sotomayor said. Recalling an earlier, momentous occasion, Sotomayor said she started to cry after her phone rang and a White House operator told her that President Obama was on the line.

“I had my left hand over my chest trying to calm my beating heart, literally,” she said in her Sept. 16 interview with C-SPAN. “And the president got on the phone and said to me, ’Judge, I would like to announce you as my selection to be the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.’

And I said to him ... I caught my breath and started to cry and said, ’Thank you, Mr. President.”’

Obama extracted two promises from her before getting off the phone, she said.

“The first was to remain the person I was, and the second was to stay connected to my community,” she said. “And I said to him that those were two easy promises to make, because those two things I could not change.”

The full Sotomayor interview will air on C-SPAN Oct. 10 during the network’s “Supreme Court Week.”

The new Supreme Court term begins Oct. 5.