Nomination of Britt Grant

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, on Britt Grant, the new nominee for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals--Britt Grant, throughout her career, has expressed views far outside the mainstream. When you read this list, you will say: How did they come up with someone so on the fringe? She is not someone who is a mainstream conservative, but way out there.

As solicitor general, she defended a law that made it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and assisted on an amicus brief arguing that defining marriage as between a man and a woman does not violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

She worked on a brief for the Supreme Court that defended a Georgia prosecutor's decision to strike Black jurors based on their race. She led Georgia's challenge to DACA, even though 85, 90 percent of all Americans are for DACA.

Before becoming Georgia's solicitor general, she argued against the Affordable Care Act, assisted on an amicus brief defending Indiana's defunding of Planned Parenthood, urged the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, and argued to strike down the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate.

So from reproductive rights to civil rights to gun safety, name a partisan legal case from the past 5 years, and there is a good chance that Britt Grant has been involved, taking up a fringe legal argument-- way out of the American mainstream--to weaken well-established rights and overturn precedent in pursuit of an ideological objective.

I would also like to bring to my colleagues' attention that in speeches and in handwritten notes--even with this extreme record--Judge Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly praised Britt Grant's record. In fact, Kavanaugh called Britt Grant ``a superb solicitor general of Georgia.'' That is someone with these extreme views.

Judge Kavanaugh's ringing endorsement of Britt Grant's record may serve as a window into his own judicial philosophy. It makes you wonder: What, exactly, does Judge Kavanaugh agree with her on so that he would call her so many laudatory things?

Does he agree with Britt Grant that a woman's constitutional, guaranteed freedom to make her own reproductive choices should be curtailed, even though an overwhelming majority of Americans support Roe? Does he believe, like Britt Grant, that States should be able to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, even though the Supreme Court has declared things the other way? Does he believe, like Britt Grant, that insurers shouldn't have to provide contraceptive coverage?

Britt Grant is the kind of lawyer Judge Kavanaugh, in his own words, considers ``superb.'' Maybe that is why they both ended up on the same short list of 25 potential out-of-the-mainstream court nominees--out of the mainstream because they were vetted by the Heritage Foundation, which believes that the government should not be involved in healthcare, and by the Federalist Society, whose leader's goal is to repeal Roe v. Wade, even though 71 percent of Americans are against that repeal.

Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or Independent, you should want a better process for choosing judges. The American people deserve judges from the legal mainstream who will interpret the law rather than make it, who will respect and defer to precedent unless there is a darn good reason not to--not just folks picked off some list prevetted by extreme conservative groups that don't represent what a majority of Americans think, and they probably don't even represent what a majority of Republicans think. But the Republican majority has been advancing an assembly line of nakedly partisan, ideological judges like Britt Grant. That Judge Kavanaugh has praised her record so roundly is concerning.

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