I didn't watch the Sotomayor hearings, but I did catch some of the Roberts hearings. It was pretty easy to see Roberts was a first rate creep. The Democratic senators who complained about Roberts have no basis. They got the hard rush from Bush, because Renquist died.
So what about Kagan? She is a liberal only to the degree you can say Obama is a liberal. This means to me, Obama and Kagan are social liberals, which means, liberal when it doesn't count much to power. They are center conservatives in their concepts of state, war, corporations and so forth. They are in the soft wing of the neoconservative system. Bush-lite. But their more sinister side shows when you realize that they are siding with Bush most of the time in economics, war, domestic repression, and foeign policy.
The best questions came from Arlen Specter and they were directed at core constitutional concepts, in particular the separation of powers, the limits on executive and judicial power. His primary concern was the erosion of congressional power, ceded to the executive and judiciary. Kagan gave highly unsatisfactory non-answers. The minute a question sound like it had `liberal' overtones, she hit the dance floor.
CG