Senate Judiciary Committee staffers are busy vetting President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, but no major decisions about the confirmation process are likely to be made until the panel’s top Democrat and Republican return to Washington.

Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy , D-Vt., and the panel’s ranking Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, are expected to meet in the coming days to try to reach agreement on how to handle Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process.

“Sen. Leahy is old school and feels strongly about working together as much as possible on the schedule and other logistics,” Leahy spokesman David Carle said.

Leahy has been traveling in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan this week and Sessions has spent the recess in Alabama. But the two men — who aides did not think Thursday had yet spoken to each other by phone — will return to Washington this weekend for a joint appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Aides predicted a meeting between the two men would follow shortly, but said no such meeting had been scheduled.

Vetting the Nominee

Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff has started examining Sotomayor’s public record — such as speeches and published legal opinions — in the initial stage of a vetting process that also typically includes the nominee’s written responses to a committee-generated questionnaire, confidential FBI reports and the committee’s own investigation.

In the hours after the nomination was announced, Republican and Democratic staffers collaborated to compose and send out late Wednesday a 10-page questionnaire for Sotomayor, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, to compete and return to the committee.

Each party’s committee staff has been allocated an additional $300,000 to pay for staff work associated with the confirmation process. That’s the same amount that was provided for handling the nominations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. . Sessions’ staff has hired three lawyers to work on a temporary basis and likely will hire at least three more, a GOP aide said. The extra staff positions are funded through the first week of October.

Timing

How long to allow for the vetting process, when to schedule a hearing, how many days to devote to hearings, and how quickly the nomination will be reported out of committee are all timing-related questions that Leahy and Sessions are likely to tackle in their initial discussions.

“I would expect the timing to be the first issue that will have to be worked out by the ranking member and the chairman,” said former Republican Sen. Mike DeWine (1995-2007), an Ohioan who served on Judiciary for the Roberts and Alito confirmations, in September 2005 and January 2006 respectively. Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., both have said they would like the Senate to confirm Sotomayor in time for her to prepare for the court’s next term, which begins in October. That time frame would likely require a floor vote before the August recess begins.

But that would mean a floor vote would come earlier than it did during the Alito and Roberts confirmation processes, and that could prompt pushback from GOP senators. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., and other Republicans have cautioned that senators need enough time to adequately review the record of Sotomayor, whom conservative talk-radio hosts and bloggers have portrayed as a “reverse racist,” for stressing the advantages of her Latina perspective, and a judicial activist intent on making policy from the bench.

“Timing is always a very important issue — you know, how long are you going to take before you start these hearings,” DeWine said.