Over the past few days, there has been a lot of inside baseball talk of who might replace Specter as the Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. Well the talk has led to Paul Kane of the Washington Post stating that Jeff Beauregard Sessions having the inside track.
Here's the twist - Sessions was denied the chance to become a Federal Judge in 1986 because he was seen as having a racially insensitive attitude.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whose early career ambition was not elected politics. A federal prosecutor in Alabama, Sessions was nominated in 1986 by Ronald Reagan to be a U.S. District Court judge, but Sessions was accused of having a racially insensitive attitude.
Specter also opposed Sessions, whose nomination was dealt a final blow when his home-state senator, the late Howell Hefflin (D-Ala.), turned against him. A decade later Sessions exacted his revenge on Hefflin when he won his Senate seat in 1996 and then got appointed to the Judiciary Committee.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/3/727534/-Jeff-Sessions-vs.-Senate-Judiciary-Committee:-Will-History-Repeat-Itself