The White House and Senate Democrats on Thursday kept up their push for a July confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The administration turned in Sotomayor’s committee questionnaire Thursday afternoon, as the nominee continued a hectic pace of courtesy calls on Capitol Hill.

“She has advanced the confirmation process by promptly complying with this Senate requirement, and now the Senate should promptly schedule hearings to fairly consider her nomination to our highest court,” said Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy , D-Vt. “The unfair attacks that have been leveled at her from outside the Senate are all the more reason to give her the chance to respond.”

Sotomayor disclosed a net worth of just over $740,000 in her questionnaire. She also told the committee that she was contacted by White House counsel Gregory Craig “with respect to the possibility of a future Supreme Court vacancy” on April 27 — three days before National Public Radio broke the news that Justice David H. Souter intended to retire.

“With her record of 17 years on the bench, this historically fast completion of the exhaustive questions is no small feat that will hopefully lead to her swift consideration by the Senate and enable her to be a member of the Supreme Court by the time they begin selecting cases in September,” Craig wrote in a blog post on the White House Web site.

Nominee Visits Republicans

Sotomayor met with several more senators Thursday, including Maine Republican Susan Collins . Collins told reporters that she questioned Sotomayor “at length” about a 2001 speech in which Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Republicans have seized on that speech to raise questions about whether Sotomayor is unduly biased as a judge.

“She assured me that she understands when deciding cases that she needs to put aside any personal experiences that might color her decisions and, as she said it, that the law is the law,” Collins said.

Collins said she was “somewhat frustrated” that Sotomayor would not discuss perhaps her most controversial case, Ricci v. DeStefano, in which Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel that upheld a district court ruling against a group of New Haven, Conn., firefighters who alleged discrimination.

Collins said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had reached an “unfair result” in the case. But, Collins said, Sotomayor declined to comment on the case because it is pending before the Supreme Court.

Texas Republican John Cornyn praised Sotomayor as “a thoroughly pre-eminent and delightful person” after his own private meeting with her Thursday.

Cornyn said he told Sotomayor he was “very disappointed” about the way some of President George W. Bush ’s appellate nominees had been treated and said he “expressed a hope” to break the “vicious cycle” of tension and “start a new trend in judicial confirmation hearings.”