The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Supreme Court Nominations (Executive Calendar)” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S5838-S5841 on Sept. 23, 2020.
The Department is one of the oldest in the US, focused primarily on law enforcement and the federal prison system. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, detailed wasteful expenses such as $16 muffins at conferences and board meetings.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Supreme Court Nominations
Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to say how much I appreciate your staying late this evening for this.
Last night, I had the chance to speak about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, somebody who, as much as anyone in our history, advanced the cause of equality between men and women. When President Clinton named her to the Supreme Court, she had already transformed American law through her trailblazing work as a professor and litigator. It is why her nomination sailed through this body with 96 votes--a reminder of a time not so very long ago when the Senate understood its constitutional duty to advise and consent, when a qualified judge would get the vast majority of Senators to vote for that person. Every single time we did that, we reestablished the idea that the judiciary is independent--
independent from what hopefully are temporary, insane partisan battles.
After earning that 96 votes, for more than a quarter century on the Court, Justice Ginsburg authored rulings that promoted fairness, advanced equality, and secured hard-won rights. They upheld affirmative action and protected a woman's right to choose. At the same time, she could never accept a decision that nullified our right to vote or otherwise limited our democratic values, even when it was hard for some of her colleagues on the highest Court in the land to perceive the systemic racism in our country.
As I said last night, because the young Joan Ruth Bader knew America would be worse off without her, without her talent, Justice Ginsburg fought hard to make America more democratic, more fair, and more free. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the majority leader of this body who now seeks to ram a replacement through the Senate. As a Senator and as a majority leader, he dedicated his career to undo the work of Justice Ginsburg and those who have fought beside her for a better America.
Pick almost any issue--from the degradation of our courts and our democracy to the sorry state of our government's fiscal condition--and for decades, you will find the majority leader's fingerprints all over the crime scene.
Let's start with the courts; that seems an appropriate place to start today. Justice Ginsburg cared deeply about what she called public respect for a confidence in the judiciary. No one in America has done more to destroy that confidence and respect than the Senator from Kentucky.
I first came to Washington as Colorado's Senator during President Obama's first term. The majority leader, who was then the minority leader, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, led the blockade against virtually all of President Obama's nominees. He filibustered the nominee for Secretary of Defense who was a Republican. In the history of the country, no nominee to be Secretary of Defense was filibustered. From George Washington to George W. Bush, Senators had used the filibuster against 68 Presidential nominees; from Washington to Bush, that entire period, there were 68 filibusters of Presidential nominees.
During President Obama's first 5 years, Republican Senators, led by Mitch McConnell, used it against 79 nominees. In 5 years of a brand-new President, they used the filibuster more times than in our history going back to George Washington.
The obstruction was relentless. It finally led Senate Democrats to change the rules in 2013 with the so-called nuclear option, allowing us to confirm judicial nominees, except for the Supreme Court and other executive appointments, with 51 votes instead of 60 votes. I am sorry about that vote.
I have apologized on this floor before about that vote. It has led us partly to where we are today. After Republicans won a majority in this body, Senator McConnell made his prior obstruction look like a game of beanbag. He wasn't in the minority anymore. Now, he was in the majority.
The next low point came on February 13, 2016. I will never forget it. I was speaking at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Colorado when I saw the crawl come on CNN announcing the death of Justice Scalia. It was a Presidential election year, and there were 342 days to go before the end of President Obama's second term--a term made possible by the American people deciding, once again, to hire, to give him the power to appoint people to the Supreme Court. Let the people decide.
One hour after Chief Justice Roberts confirmed Scalia's death, Senator McConnell declared the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice; therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President. That is not what the Constitution says. When there is a vacancy, the President shall nominate, and the Senate shall advise and consent. Today, we have a Senate with this majority that is not even interested in advising. As we stand here tonight, they have given their consent without even knowing who the nominee is going to be.
Hoping cooler heads would prevail, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, someone a Republican Senate had previously confirmed with 76 votes and whom the former Republican Senator from Utah, my friend Orrin Hatch, once called ``a consensus nominee for the Supreme Court.''
I have known Merrick Garland for a quarter of a century. I worked for him fresh out of law school when both of us served in the Deputy Attorney General's office at the Department of Justice. I have never heard another lawyer or anyone, for that matter, refer to Garland without the highest admiration. He set the standard for excellence. He was a lawyer's lawyer.
Senate Republicans, led by the majority leader, refused to even meet with Judge Garland, let alone give him the courtesy of a hearing so the American people could see what an outstanding person he was, how brilliant and fair-minded he was. The majority leader would go on to say about this disgraceful moment in our democracy's history that ``One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and said, `Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.' ''
We know what happened next. We are still living in ``next.'' For the rest of 2016, the majority leader held the seat open all year, 342 days with no hearings, no meetings, no vote. One of the Senators in this body went home--I was proud they went home and said:
I am never going to vote for Merrick Garland, but I think it is wrong for us not to have a vote. We should have a vote. I should go home and explain why I voted the way I voted and have to defend my vote
Two days later, a super PAC run by a former clerk of Justice Scalia started to threaten they would run a primary against him if he didn't change his mind, and he did. We know what happened.
Majority Leader McConnell kept the seat open. He helped elect Donald Trump who ran for office waving around a list of judges that he would appoint to the court and made Donald Trump, of all people, the first President in American history with the power to fill every judicial vacancy with a simple majority vote because Senator McConnell later used the nuclear option to change the rules again without really having any debate here. As a result, he has used that power to confirm 217 judges. Nearly a quarter of the Federal bench are now Trump appointees.
In 2017, Senator McConnell detonated his own nuclear option to lower the required votes for Supreme Court Justices from 60 to 51, as he warned--in fairness to him--as he warned he would do. He installed Neil Gorsuch in what should have been Garland's seat. In 2018, he jammed through the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh under his new regime, delivering the confirmation by a margin of two votes, the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court nominee since 1881.
Throughout it all, he seated a roster of judges across the Federal bench who otherwise could not make the ``B'' team. The Senate confirmed a judge who opposed the State proclamation honoring an association of professional women because it had dared to talk about glass ceilings and pay equity. The Senate confirmed a lawyer who wrote blog posts peddling conspiracies about Barack Obama and comparing abortion to slavery; an attorney who suggested judges can ignore judicial precedence they deem incorrect and who justified denying habeas corpus to enemy combatants with the brutal ancient dictum: In times of war, the laws are silent.
Then the Senate confirmed its first-ever nominee rated ``Not Qualified'' by the American Bar Association. It had never happened before in American history. But once was not enough. The Senate went on to approve six more Trump nominees rated ``Not Qualified'' by the ABA. You can't find qualified lawyers? You can't find a lawyer who can just--not even exceeds--just meets? These people are unqualified. What qualifies them is many of them are in their thirties and are going to be on the courts for my lifetime.
I thought that was all rock bottom. Then last Friday, 1 hour after we learned of Justice Ginsburg's passing, the majority leader issued a press release saying: ``President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.'' That is the opposite of what he sent out when Justice Scalia died.
When the majority leader blocked Judge Garland, when he said the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice, there were 342 days left in President Obama's term--342. There are 119 days left in President Trump's term, and there are 41 days left before this election.
Here is what the history really is, not the masquerade that the majority leader has been engaging in with the American people: From the founding of this country until today, we have had nine Supreme Court vacancies arise in the first 6 months of a Presidential election year. Nine vacancies have arisen in the first 6 months of a Presidential election year. The Senate confirmed every single one of them, except Merrick Garland. The Senate has never confirmed a Supreme Court nominee this close to a Presidential election, never in the history of America.
Now, we have given our consent, apparently, before we even know who the nominee is. Because of Donald Trump's magical powers, we are willing to somehow take it on faith. But these traditions make no difference to the majority leader. Thanks to him, we now live in a world where confirming judges has become one more vicious partisan exercise, where confirmation votes will now break on party lines for the foreseeable future--and, perhaps, forever--and where every ruling a Justice makes is going to be viewed as that is what we would expect from an Obama judge, that is what we would expect from a Trump-
appointed judge. It is the opposite of the way this worked when I was in law school.
The majority leader says: I am just putting it back to the days before we had a filibuster of circuit court judges because now there is no filibuster when it comes to Justices or judges. It is not accurate, and it is not right because, in those days, if you were qualified, you would get 96 votes like Ruth Bader Ginsburg got and like Justice Scalia got. I think he got 95 votes. Yet now we have exported the vicious partisanship out of this Chamber and into the highest Court of the land.
Senator McConnell has not only damaged the integrity of our courts--
something the late Justice Ginsburg cared deeply about--but he has also worked to sabotage her legacy of an America that is more democratic, more fair, and more free.
Over his 36 years in office, the majority leader has voted against nearly every piece of legislation that has promoted equality and advanced civil rights. Again and again, he has voted against banning discrimination based on someone's sexual orientation, prosecuting hate crimes, and improving equity in the workplace. He even voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. More than anyone in America--and I say he is actually proud of this--he is responsible for exposing our democracy to a deluge of money, special interests, and foreign interference.
The majority leader has voted against every major campaign finance reform bill that has come to this floor. In fact, he led the fight against the bipartisan reform bill that was written by the late Senator John McCain, and when he failed to stop it in the Senate, Senator McConnell went to the courts to have it overturned, paving the way years later for the disastrous ruling in Citizens United, which has allowed billionaires to flood our political system in the name of free speech when average working people are being drowned out.
He voted against the bipartisan National Voter Registration Act, which allowed people to register to vote when they got their driver's licenses.
Ahead of the 2016 elections, he refused to join President Obama and issue a bipartisan statement to alert the American people to the threat of Russian interference in our elections. He refused to do it, and the American people didn't know until after the election was over that Vladimir Putin was putting his thumb on the scale. To this day, he refuses to let us vote on bipartisan bills to protect our elections from foreign interference or even bills to fully fund our elections so that people can vote safely in the middle of a pandemic.
There is only one person who gets to decide whether we vote on something around here, and he is the majority leader. I would like to see which Senators would vote against protecting our elections from Russian interference. I would like to see it, but we can't know because he won't allow it to come here for a vote. I would like to see who in this Chamber actually is against universal background checks, something we haven't been able to take a vote on because the majority leader won't allow a vote.
Come out and vote.
It has been over 570 days since the House passed the For the People Act, a bill that would ban gerrymandering, expand early voting, create automatic voter registration, and make election day a national holiday, among other reforms. The majority leader refuses to bring it to a vote. He called it a power grab. That is the Orwellian language that he uses. The only power grab that is, is a power grab by the American people to try to pry a little bit of power away from the majority leader from Kentucky on behalf of himself.
I am not sure any majority leader in our history has had this low of regard for our democracy and for our institutions than the Senator and, I would say, less regard for the American people as well, because every time he has taken a knife to our institutions, he is in front of the cameras, talking about what an institutionalist he is.
When he became majority leader, he said his first priority would be to ``restore the Senate to the place our Founders, in their wisdom, had intended, not the hollow shell''----
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will suspend
Rule XIX, paragraph 2, provides that no Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.
The Senator may proceed.
Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I was interrupted, but let me go back.
When he became majority leader, he said the first priority would be to ``restore the Senate to the place the Founders, in their wisdom, had intended, not the hollow shell of the institution [Harry Reid had created].''
Harry Reid was his predecessor. I think I remember him being on the floor, calling Harry Reid the worst majority leader that had ever existed in history. I don't think he was sanctioned for that.
He promised ``to open up the legislative process in a way that allows more amendments from both sides.''
Last year, we voted on 26 amendments. In the entire year last year, we voted on 26 amendments. Only eight of those amendments passed, and I think Senator Paul, of Kentucky, had four of those amendments.
Sometimes it's going to mean [actually] working more often. Sometimes it's going to mean working late, but restoring the Senate is the right thing to do.
We are not working late around here. He said we were going to work on Fridays. Half the time, when Harry Reid was the majority leader, I couldn't go home until Friday. Since the majority leader has been here, I have been home for dinner every Thursday night.
He said we need to recommit to what he called a rational, functioning appropriations process. This year, we haven't passed a single appropriations bill in the Senate. Last year, we had the longest government shutdown in American history.
``We need to return to regular order,'' he said. This is from the majority leader who put a bill on the floor to strip healthcare from 16 million Americans, a bill we didn't even see until a few hours before the vote. There are so many of these things that we don't even remember them anymore. He claims to be an institutionalist, but he has brought this institution to the lowest it has been.
It is no different than his claim to being a fiscal conservative. I have heard him say over and over again that our debt and deficits are the single biggest threat to America's future. He called it ``the transcendent issue of our era.''
He said, ``Until we fix that problem [the deficit], we can't fix America.''
He said Americans are ``tired of the spending, debt and government takeovers'' and complained that our debt ``makes us look a lot like Greece.''
He claims to be a fiscal hawk--he has done it his entire career--but the truth is there is not an American, living or dead, who has put more debt on the balance sheet of this country than Mitch McConnell--$17 trillion--and that is just over the last 20 years. And for what--to invest in education? to build our roads and bridges? to do something about mental health in the country or water infrastructure? For what? It has been to cut taxes for the richest people in the country and to borrow it all from China, which is the opposite of what he said he was doing, the opposite of what he promised.
He said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. They never have. He said they would benefit the middle class, but two-thirds have gone to the top 20 percent at a time when we have had the worst income inequality that we have had since 1928, when we have had an economy that, for 50 years, 90 percent of the American people haven't seen a pay raise. That means, in the first 25 years of this century, we are on track to spend $6.8 trillion on tax cuts for the richest 20 percent of Americans.
It is exactly the same thing as if a mayor in any one of our communities in our States had said to their neighbors and to their city councils and to the press: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before
You would say: Well, that worries me a little bit. What are you going to spend the money on? Are you going to spend it on our roads?
No.
Are you going to spend it on our bridges?
No.
On our water system?
No.
On mental health? On COVID? On our public health infrastructure?
I am going to take that money that I am borrowing from the Chinese, and I am going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in town.
That is the majority leader's tax policy, and that is what it has been since 2001.
This speech isn't about spending, but while I have the microphone, here is what we could have done for $6.8 trillion: We could have created universal preschool for every child in America. These are not either/or by the way. That is how big a number $6.8 trillion is. We could have invested in the 70 percent of Americans who don't graduate from college so that they can earn a living wage when they graduate from high school, not the minimum wage. We could have made public college affordable for every middle-class American, given every teacher in America a 50-percent pay raise and paid them like the professionals that they are.
We could have cut child poverty by 40 percent in this country. We could have protected Social Security so that we would know it would be there for our children and our grandchildren. We could have rebuilt America's roads, bridges, tunnels, and airports. We could have laid high-speed broadband in every community, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, covered everyone with high-quality healthcare by creating a public option. We could have passed paid family and medical leave, invested in science and public health so that we could have been more prepared for the global pandemic. We might have even paid down some of our debt and actually acted fiscally responsible.
In other words, we could have changed the destiny of America. We could have added to Justice Ginsburg's legacy by making this country more democratic, more fair, and more free. We still can, but we can't do it as long as the majority leader is continuing to pursue these policies.
We have to choose leaders in the Senate who will build this country better than we found it, not leave it in tatters for our children and grandchildren to pick through the rubble.
Instead of making the Senate work on behalf of the American people, the Senator from Kentucky has run roughshod over this institution, doing whatever he can get away with politically. We are at a point at which what you can get away with here is the only rule that is left.
As I said last night in this Senate, words have lost their meaning, and when words lose their meaning and when promises mean nothing and when commitments mean nothing, that is when institutions fail. It is moments like this that I remind my colleagues that this is not the first Republic to risk failure because of all of this--the Senate, the Supreme Court, the centuries of rules, written and unwritten, that have guided this Republic.
We are not preserving them for us. We are preserving them for the American people because, without our institutions, we can't do what we need to do in this democracy, whether it is regarding climate change or healthcare or education or any issue that the American people care about, no matter what side of the political aisle they are on.
Justice Ginsburg appreciated this. She described her philosophy this way:
I think I am an originalist in the sense of what these great men meant--a Constitution that would govern through the ages. At least, they hoped it would provide an instrument of government that would endure.
That is what is at stake in this election--whether we will accept this sorry chapter in our history as the new normal or insist on a government that can actually govern and is focused on the needs and desires of the American people.
I hope deeply that we are going to put this era behind us, and I am not for going back to some old era but to build a democracy that is worthy of the 21st century, worthy of the example Ruth Bader Ginsburg set, worthy of the expectations that our kids and grandkids reasonably have of us and that most of us have for America in this world.
That is the choice in this election, and to borrow a phrase from the majority leader, the ``American people should have a voice'' in the outcome. It is my hope that in 41 days they will.
Madam President, I thank you for your patience and thank the staff for their patience.
I yield the floor.
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