THE first important contest of what could prove to be a pivotal election year in American politics gets under way today in a crowded Senate committee room on Capitol Hill.

It is ostensibly a hearing into the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito, President George W Bush’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the nine-member US Supreme Court.

In reality, it will be a partisan affair, an opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to probe each other’s strengths and weaknesses and to test the waters of public opinion on some of the most contentious issues of war and peace facing a divided and somewhat disillusioned country.

The formal hearings in front of the 18 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will last a week.

The committee — made up of ten Republicans and eight Democrats — will then vote on the nomination and, assuming they approve it, send it to the full Senate for debate and a final vote later this month. With a Republican majority in the Senate, the progress of the judge — a well-qualified, conservative jurist with more than a decade’s experience on the federal bench — ought to be relatively painless.

While there are potential pitfalls for him — a number of centrist Republicans may be uncomfortable about some of his more assertively conservative stances, especially on abortion — the real interest in the confirmation process is likely to be what it tells us about the battleground issues of US politics in the sixth year of the Bush presidency.

There are crucial mid-term congressional elections in November that could change the complexion of congress and could also set the themes for political debate in the run up to the 2008 presidential campaign.

Thanks in no small part to the baleful influence of television, these events have become rather predictable turgid events.

Although the aim is supposedly to gauge the nominee’s views on matters of legal philosophy, you can be certain that the vast bulk of what is said in the committee room this week will come from the senators rather than from the judge himself. Indeed, it is a useful rule of thumb that the more Judge Alito speaks, the more difficulty he will be in.

The simple truth is that there cannot be that much more to learn about the judge than what has been revealed in the three months since he was nominated. He has already been to Capitol Hill many times to meet lawmakers privately; tens of thousands of pages of his opinions, judgments, essays and job application letters have been released. That is why in large part the confirmation process becomes a sort of televised talk show for ambitious senators.

Led by Patrick Leahy, the party’s senior member of the committee, Democrats will try to portray Judge Alito as an extremist. They will cite his written opinion, in a letter seeking a job in the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, that Roe v Wade, the 1973 Court ruling that in effect legalised abortion in the United States, was wrongly decided.

They will also probe his rulings and judgments on national security issues, eager to demonstrate that he favours giving too much power to the President in time of war. There will also be detailed rhetorical questioning about his views on race relations, abortion and states’ rights; and he will also face some genuinely tough inquiry on some personal issues, including allegations that he failed to withdraw from a case involving a company in which he had an interest.

Democrats hope that, by the end of the process, the judge will look like an extremist, a reactionary who will aggressively seek to undo many of the big legal changes in the field of abortion and civil rights in the past 20 years. They will not much mind if he gets approved — the aim will be to hold up Judge Alito as the unacceptable face of George Bush’s conservative America — and hope voters will agree in the congressional elections later this year.

Republicans will try to paint a different public picture of the judge.

They will aim to show that he is not some scary avenging angel, eager to strip women and ethnic minorities of their rights and hand over the nation’s civil liberties to President Bush’s FBI and CIA, but a judge in the finest traditions of American judicial philosophy; someone who simply sees it as his role to interpret and uphold the laws as they are, not create new ones.

The stakes are high. Not only a new Supreme Court but, potentially, a new political landscape for America.

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