WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee approved 14-0 and sent to the full Senate today the nomination of Judge Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, which has been a member short for seven months.
Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said the Senate was likely to vote Friday or Monday on Kennedy, 51, President Reagan's third choice to fill the seat vacant since Justice Lewis Powell resigned June 26.
Before the committee vote, Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., expressed concern about Kennedy's sensitivity to race and sex discrimination, but said: 'We have firm grounds to conclude that Judge Kennedy's views reflect the core values of our constitutional traditions.'
A spokesman for Kennedy, a federal appeals court judge in California, said he was at work in his office in Sacramento today and would have no comment on the vote.
Although he is regarded as a conservative, he is seen even by his critics as far less dogmatic than Reagan's first and most controversial nominee, Robert Bork, and much closer to the moderate role that Powell filled on the court.
Bork, 60, widely criticized by liberal groups and many senators as a right-wing ideologue who would reverse 30 years of progress on civil rights and individual liberties, was rejected by the Senate 58-42 in October. The next nominee, Douglas Ginsburg, 41, withdrew his nomination in November after admitting smoking marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s.
Both Bork and Ginsburg are judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Bork earlier this month announced his resignation from that court effective Feb. 5.
Kennedy, a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California since his appointment by President Ford in 1975, was nominated by Reagan Nov. 11. Before going on the appeals court, Kennedy was in private practice in Sacramento and was a legislative lobbyist for several business interests.
During three days of hearings in December before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kennedy was praised by many lawyers, law enforcement organizations, academics and conservative groups as a mainstream jurist. An American Bar Association review panel unanimously gave him its highest rating.
Kennedy was criticized by some liberal groups for his past decisions on civil rights and women's rights cases and for his memberships in four private clubs that formally or informally excluded women or blacks from membership.
The nominee acknowledged belonging to the exclusionary clubs but said he had resigned from them after trying to change their policies from within.
Regarding civil rights and women's rights decisions for which he was also criticized, Kennedy said he had decided them correctly on the basis of the facts and the law. Among the rulings were ones against the plaintiffs in suits seeking 'comparable worth' pay for women, a controversial pay equity scheme, Hispanic voting rights and housing discrimination.
Kennedy also emphasized that he supports the major civil rights and individual liberties decisions of the high court over the last 30 years.
This contrasted sharply with Bork, who had been accused of opposing most such decisions at one time or another. In voting against Bork, many senators contended he would shift the high court far to the right for well into the next century by being the swing vote on many controversial issues on which the present court is often divided 4-4.
Although Kennedy testified that there is a constitutionally protected right to privacy -- the underpinning for the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision permitting abortion -- he did not commit himself on the abortion issue.