President Obama himself addressed the bubbling controversy, which is emerging as among the leading GOP lines of attack against Sotomayor, asserting on Friday Sotomayor “would have restated” the comment if given another chance.

But that message – which reaffirmed the official White House spin articulated earlier the same day by press secretary Robert Gibbs – did little to build consensus among Sotomayor supporters, who took to the Sunday show circuit with a cacophony of explanations for the comment, which Sotomayor made during a 2001 speech at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley…

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat with a large Puerto Rican constituency, refused to concede that Sotomayor chose her words poorly, predicting on ABC’s “This Week” that “she’ll stand by the entire speech. I think that she will show that the speech, when you read it, says rule of law comes above experience,” said Schumer, who as a member of the Judiciary Committee will participate in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. Pressed by host George Stephanopoulos, Schumer added “the specific sentence there is simply saying that people’s experiences matter and we ought to have some diversity of experience on the court. And I think that’s accurate.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a fellow Judiciary Democrat, suggested the debate over Sotomayor’s statement may be taking it more seriously than she intended it, though Feinstein herself seemed torn between defending it or apologizing for it.