OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015

Floor Speech

Date: March 3, 2016
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Executive Branch Government Operations Judicial Branch Legislative Branch

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member for that courtesy. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states quite clearly that the President shall nominate a candidate when there is a vacancy in the United States Supreme Court. I would like the record of this discussion to reflect that the term ``shall,'' as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary--the relevant definition--is A, used to express a command or exhortation, and, B, used in laws, regulations, or directives to express what is mandatory.

Under the Constitution that we are all sworn to uphold, the President of the United States has a mandatory duty. I think it is important that he accomplish it and nominate a candidate.

I ask my colleagues to imagine if there were another mandatory duty of the President of the United States that this President refused to perform--imagine the cavalcade of Republican Senators to the studios of Fox News to decry and condemn this President for that omission. This should be no different.

The President must and will do his constitutional duty. If and when he does that, then the constitutional burden of duty moves from the President to the U.S. Senate, and we will then have to decide whether we will abide by our constitutional duty, whether to follow the regular order that so many of us have articulated as an important goal, whether to follow the precedents of previous nominees, whether to act fairly, whether we are going to be an organization here, an institution, that will prejudge a nominee before we even know who he or she is. Prejudge is at the heart of prejudice; it is not a good thing for the Senate to be doing. Finally, we will have to decide what kind of example we want to set to the rest of the world--of a country that follows the regular order as established in its constitution and has its institutions of government do their duty or as a country that will bend, twist, and dodge those responsibilities because of the demands of immediate politics.

Those are choices I will address when they come to us. For now I wish only to say that the President's mandatory duty is clear, and no one should be surprised that he performs it.

I thank the Senator from Vermont.

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