Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I have been consistently voting against cloture motions to proceed to debate on judicial nominations because the process by which we are considering these nominations has been deeply broken.

I will again, today, be voting no on cloture even though the nominee we are voting on to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is Mark Bennett from Hawaii. I support Mark Bennett's nomination, and I spoke on his behalf during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. When debate time ends, I will vote for his confirmation.

Mark is recognized as being one of the best qualified lawyers in the State of Hawaii. He has served as a Federal prosecutor, our State's attorney general, and in private practice. He has experience in trial and appellate work, on civil and criminal matters, at the State and Federal levels. He understands legislating and has served in the executive branch. He has received high ratings from the American Bar Association and from the Hawaii State Bar Association. He is well respected and has been honored multiple times by his colleagues.

I have every confidence that Mark will put his skills and experience to good use on the bench as a fair and impartial judge who is beholden to nothing but the law and the Constitution. However, as has been my practice since the beginning of this Congress and session, I will vote no on cloture on Mark's nomination. I will vote this way to call attention to my disagreement and deep concern over how the Senate Judiciary Committee is conducting its judicial nomination hearings.

The Senate has a constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent on judicial nominees, and I take this obligation very seriously. The American people depend on the Senate to fully consider and vet each judicial nominee. Throughout the course of their lifetime appointments, these judges will issue rulings and opinions that will touch each of our lives. The process of nominating, considering, and confirming judges should be a deliberate one. Its purpose should not be to confirm as many judges as quickly as possible. Senators should be able to provide input on who should sit on the Federal bench. Senators should have adequate opportunity to hear from third-party experts about the records and qualifications of each nominee, and Senators should have enough time to question and examine a nominee during the confirmation hearing. Yet, over the past year and a half, we have seen a breakdown in the way this process should work.

The President has, essentially, outsourced the judicial selection process to two organizations that have strong, ideologically driven agendas--the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. These nominees have been chosen without the consent of their home State Senators, as has been the practice through what is known as the blue- slip process. By ignoring the traditional blue-slip process, the President and his allies in Congress have been rendering the Senate's constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent increasingly meaningless.

The White House and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee have also undermined the independent processes through which the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary evaluates whether a nominee is qualified for the job. Ignoring this traditional process has resulted in the nominations and confirmations of a number of deeply unqualified judges. Some of these nominees have been unable to answer basic questions about judicial procedure or the law during their confirmation hearings. Others lack the kind of experiences one would want in those who will have lifetime appointments to the Federal courts.

Under this administration, we have also seen the rushed considerations of many nominees for the Federal circuit courts. Judges who serve on our circuit courts are only one step away from the Supreme Court and deserve to be scrutinized closely in the Judiciary Committee. Over the last year and a half, however, the Judiciary Committee has overridden the objections of the minority to hold an unprecedented six nomination hearings with more than one circuit judge nominee being considered simultaneously on one panel. This means that members of the Judiciary Committee have only 5 minutes in total to ask questions of not just one but two circuit court nominees, including the time it takes for them to answer our questions. This is scarcely enough time to vet these nominees, many of whom are highly controversial and deserve maximum scrutiny. The American people deserve much more as we consider lifetime appointments to the Federal bench.

Until we return to a normal process through which we consider lifetime appointments to the Federal bench, I will continue to oppose cloture on each judicial nomination by this President and encourage my colleagues to join me in this effort.

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