WASHINGTON – Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican equating Sonia Sotomayor's supposed empathy with racial bias, was blocked from the federal bench himself two decades ago for making insensitive remarks about the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP.

The third-term Alabama senator, this week at least, is the face of a party without a clear leader. His role strikes some as hypocritical. But arguably, no one knows more intimately what a political minefield race has been for the GOP.

Nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the federal bench, Sessions, then a federal prosecutor, was attacked by liberals for "gross insensitivity" on matters of race. Notably, he is reported to have joked that the KKK — a violent white supremacist group during much of its history — wouldn't be so bad but for their use of marijuana. The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, he allegedly said, were communist-inspired and tried to force civil rights down people's throats.

Sessions' nomination never made it to the Senate floor. His home-state senator, the late Howell Heflin, voted against him.

Flash forward two decades and Sessions, 62, is more than just a survivor; he was one of the biggest winners in the 2008 elections. Sixty-four percent of his state voted to return him to Washington in a year when the electorate roundly rejected Republicans nationally.

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Sessions is the personification of a party with an overwhelmingly white, Southern, religious membership.