Senator's sounding strained after judgment (8)
I believe the answer is:
sentence
'judgment' is the definition.
(sentence is a kind of judgment)
'senator's sounding strained' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite understand how this works, but
'senator' could be 'sen' and 'sen' is present in the answer.
This explanation may well be incorrect...
'after' acts as a link.
(Other definitions for sentence that I've seen before include "Grammatical unit and prison term" , "It makes sense" , "Pass judgement on" , "Written" , "Sequence of words - pronounced in court" .)