Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I said on the first day that Judge Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate that this proceeding was not normal. On its face, it looked like a normal confirmation hearing. The family was there. He was sitting in the chair with the table in front of him, ready to address the committee. The cameras were on. The Senators were all seated, prepared to ask questions. All of it looked normal, but nothing about this confirmation process has been normal.

These hearings began at a time when we had access to only a tiny fraction of the documents from Judge Kavanaugh's record. In fact, the night before the proceedings started, we got a document dump of 42,000 pages. Even less of the information--the 3 years of his time as a Staff Secretary in the White House--has been available to the American people or to us. That is still true today.

These hearings were about a nominee, in the end, who was handpicked by a President--a nominee who had good credentials. There is absolutely no doubt about that. There are many nominees--potential nominees--who have good credentials. In this case, this particular person was picked at a time in our history with perhaps the most expansive view of Presidential power possible--a nominee who has actually written in an opinion that a President should be able to declare laws unconstitutional.

These views go beyond the mainstream, and this confirmation process has only gone farther astray. With what happened during the last 2 weeks and in light of Dr. Ford's compelling testimony, it was deeply troubling. I will talk about this at length.

I want to begin where I first started--what we know about Judge Kavanaugh's record and what it suggests about the kind of Justice he would be. In the last decades, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided whom you can marry, where you can go to school, who can vote, and for people like my grandpa, who worked 1,500 feet underground in the mines in Ely, MN, his entire life, the Supreme Court has decided how safe your workplace is.

The next Supreme Court Justice will make decisions that affect people across the country--their lives--forever. The next Supreme Court Justice will rule on cases that could determine whether health insurers can deny coverage to people who are sick or who have preexisting conditions and whether women's rights are protected. The next Supreme Court Justice will be in a position to serve as a check and balance on the other branches of government. That person must be someone who is fair and impartial and who demonstrates a commitment to the truth without consideration of politics or partisanship.

It has been our responsibility--every Senator in this Chamber--to determine if Judge Kavanaugh would protect the careful balance of power among the three coequal branches that our Founders designed. We must determine if he would stand up for the rule of law without consideration of politics or partisanship, if he believes in the simple idea that no one is above the law.

We knew coming into the hearing that Judge Kavanaugh's views of Executive power were among the most expansive we have ever seen and that he has been making the case for strong Presidential powers for decades. In a 2009 piece in the University of Minnesota Law Review, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that a sitting President should not be the subject of an investigation or even be required to answer questions as part of a special counsel's investigation. In that article, he argued, it is not a good use of the President's time to prepare for an interview or questioning by special counsel. He made no exception for an investigation addressing threats to our national security, even when a foreign power has somehow interfered in our country's affairs.

It is not hard to see why these views are relevant during this critical constitutional moment. There is an extensive, ongoing investigation by a special counsel, and the President's private lawyer and campaign chairman have been found guilty of multiple Federal crimes.

The man appointed as special counsel--a man who has served with distinction under Presidents from both parties--has been under siege, as well as the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General.

In the same article that Judge Kavanaugh wrote, he made the point that if a President did something ``dastardly,'' then Congress could act, arguing that a criminal investigation should be put on hold until the end of the President's term. When I asked him what ``dastardly'' means, he could not answer, even when I asked about a President. Who knows what he or she could do--commit murder, jeopardize our national security, obstruct an investigation, or engage in white collar crime? I still didn't get an answer about what ``dastardly'' means.

The judge's expansive view of Presidential power is part of a much broader pattern of writing and commentary. More than a decade before, in a 1998 piece in the Georgetown Law Journal, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that the President should be able to remove a special counsel at will.

This is the opposite direction from what we did in the Judiciary Committee when we passed bipartisan legislation earlier this year on a 14-to-7 vote to enact additional protections for the special counsel and all future special counsels.

At a 2016 event at the American Enterprise Institute, the judge was animated and almost gleeful when he said he would ``put the final nail'' in Morrison v. Olson, a Supreme Court decision that upheld the now-expired independent counsel statute. It is hard to imagine that he would respect a 30- year-old precedent and protect the integrity of a special counsel investigation in light of that statement.

At a roundtable discussion in 1999, he criticized the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in U.S. v. Nixon that compelled President Nixon to comply with the subpoena to produce tapes and documents written by a Minnesotan, Justice Warren Berger.

When this came up in the hearing, Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly characterized the case as one of the greatest moments in our country's judicial history, but he refused to answer, when asked, the question of whether that case was correctly decided.

These are incredible statements with implications that are clear when you think about what is going on in our country today. The dedicated public servants who work in our Justice Department--including the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the special counsel, and the FBI--have been subjected to repeated threats and have had their work politicized and their motives questioned.

I asked Judge Kavanaugh if these statements reflect his views today, but he said only that he wasn't making constitutional arguments. He did not dispute that he believes, as a matter of policy, that these are the types of broad powers a President should be able to exercise. He said that he was thinking of ways to make the Presidency more effective.

These are not just abstract legal concepts; they are ideas that could directly impact the future of our democracy, as well as the lives of Americans.

There are other pieces of this puzzle that make clear what a broad view of Executive power Judge Kavanaugh has. To cite one example, his opinion in Seven-Sky v. Holder discusses when a President can decline to enforce a law, even if a court has upheld it as constitutional. The judge wrote that ``the President may decline to enforce a statute . . . when the President deems the statute unconstitutional.''

What does that mean? That means the President could decide he could just hold a statute unconstitutional even if a court has held it is, in fact, constitutional. That is what that means. It is not a law review writing. It is not something written when he was in college or in law school. It is actually something he wrote in a case.

What would that mean for women's health? What would that mean at a time when the administration is challenging protections for people who are sick or have preexisting conditions? I asked him if he believed the President could declare these protections unconstitutional, even if a court upheld them. This isn't a hypothetical example. The administration is now arguing in a Texas district court that the Affordable Care Act's preexisting conditions protection is unconstitutional.

The judge refused to answer whether a President could simply ignore a law, even one upheld by the courts. He didn't answer when Senator Durbin asked it, when Senator Blumenthal asked it, and when Senator Harris posed the same question.

The days of the divine rights of Kings ended with the Magna Carta in 1215. Centuries later, in the wake of the American Revolution, a check on the executive was a major foundation of our country's Constitution, for it was James Madison who wrote in Federalist 47: ``The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.''

There is more. None of the judge's colleagues joined the section of his opinion in Aiken County outlining his views on when Presidents can ignore the law, and one who was an appointee of President George H.W. Bush stated explicitly that reaching that issue was unnecessary to decide the case.

Judge Kavanaugh has made very clear over the years that he has an incredibly broad view of the types of protections that should be extended to a sitting President. Without further answers from him during the hearing, we are left only with his writings and his previous statements. These writings say that a sitting President should not have to be subject to a criminal investigation; that a sitting President should be able to remove a special counsel; that a sitting President should not have to agree to an interview with the special counsel; and that a sitting President has the legal authority to ignore the law.

At this time in our history, we need a Justice who is independent and who will serve as a check on the other branches, which is what our Founding Fathers set up--not a judge who would allow the President to avoid accountability or who believes the President's views alone should carry the day.

Despite many opportunities, Judge Kavanaugh did not convince me he would be an independent jurist who would maintain the fundamental idea we all learned in grade school. What is it? No one is above the law.

Another concern I have is what Judge Kavanaugh's views would mean for American consumers. In one opinion that was later overturned by the entire DC Circuit, Judge Kavanaugh argued that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional, calling it a threat to individual liberty. He said this about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Bureau was founded in the wake, as you know, of the financial crisis and has now helped more than 30 million consumers obtain more than $12 billion in relief. The Bureau helps protect consumers as they deal with financial institutions that offer credit cards, loans, and mortgages.

What did the judge say? He found it unconstitutional. Thankfully, the full DC Circuit came to the opposite conclusion--all the other judges. The majority recognized that millions of families were devastated by the financial crisis, with about 4 million families losing their homes in foreclosure and even more slipping seriously behind on their mortgages.

Judges appointed by Presidents from both parties came to the opposite conclusion of the nominee who is before us today, and the majority on that court concluded that the Bureau should stay in place, as Congress intended.

While the DC Circuit made the right decision in that case, what struck me was just how far the judge had gone in his opinion. The judge was not just talking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in that case. His opinion referred to independent agencies as a ``headless fourth branch''--that is a quote--of government, and it could threaten other agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from scams and anti-competitive mergers, or the agencies that helped to stabilize our economy after the financial crisis, like the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Social Security Administration, which distributes benefits to more than 60 million elderly and disabled Americans and has had a single director, just like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for decades, since 1994.

Judge Kavanaugh has called independent agencies a threat to individual liberty not just once--no, more than once. In that same Minnesota Law Review article I mentioned that outlined his expansive view of Executive power, the judge criticized the 80-year-old precedent that upheld the constitutionality of our independent agencies.

I asked Judge Kavanaugh about his conclusion that the Bureau was unconstitutional. He did not dispute this conclusion, but he did say his opinion simply called for a change to the law so the Director of the Bureau could be fired by the President at will. I found that answer problematic.

When Congress drafted the law that created the Bureau, it made the choice--we made the choice right here in this Chamber--to give the Director a 5-year term to provide some independence from politics. This was a choice that we made in this Chamber. Not everyone agreed with it, but by majority vote it passed. It passed in the Senate, and it passed in the House. We made that decision.

During our discussion on the judge's expansive views of Executive power at the hearing, he kept telling me that the scope of Presidential authority was a matter of policy that Congress should decide. He repeated this answer often to me and to others. When it comes to Presidential power, he said that Congress should decide.

Look at what happened here when it comes to protecting consumers. In this case, Congress did decide; we actually passed a law. We said we wanted this independent Director to have a 5-year term over this very important agency that returned $12 billion to consumers who have been victims of scams and mortgage fraud. It was Congress's decision. Did that matter to the judge in this dissent that he wrote? It did not.

It seems to me, just looking at all these opinions, that the judge's record is this. When he likes what Congress decides, he says: Hey, Congress has the final say. When he doesn't like what Congress decides, he then thinks the judge should make decision.

What does that mean? In this case, he would have rewritten the consumer protection law over the wishes of Congress. What would that mean for the lives of Americans? After what this country has been through, after families who worked hard and tried to save for the future lost billions of dollars, he ruled that the agency that is designed to protect them was unconstitutional, and it is not an isolated example.

In another case, he argued that the net neutrality rules were unconstitutional. Those were the guidelines developed by the FCC to help consumers and small businesses have an even playing field when it came to the internet. Those net neutrality protections would have prevented internet service providers from blocking, slowing, and prioritizing web traffic. One again, the full DC Circuit--those other judges--decided against Judge Kavanaugh, and these key consumer protections were upheld by a panel of judges appointed by Presidents of both parties.

The question I always come back to is this: What will this mean to Americans? Here is the kicker: The outcome that the judge went out of his way to reach in the net neutrality case protects the First Amendment rights of corporations at the expense of the First Amendment rights of individuals. That is why that case is such a problem, but these aren't the only reasons why there is great concern for consumers. In announcing the judges's nomination, the White House touted the fact that he has overruled Federal agency actions 75 times. The White House also said in a document that it sent out that he led the efforts to rein in executive agencies.

When I asked him about this in his hearing, he said that he had ruled both for and against executive agencies, but his record makes clear that he has ruled against them in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Judge Kavanaugh's record suggests that health and safety standards and environmental standards would be at risk if he is confirmed to the Supreme Court. He has called the 34-year-old precedent, a case called Chevron--the same precedent that ensures these protections stay on the books--an atextual invention of courts and a ``judicially orchestrated shift of power.'' That is what he said.

To make it clear, this is not just one case that happens to be sitting out there in the old dusty law books. No, it is the most cited case in administrative law. It has been referenced in more than 15,000 legal decisions, and it has been championed by scholars and jurists across the ideological spectrum, including Justice Scalia. That is that case.

What would happen if we didn't have this case? Well, I guess we would have the judge making decisions instead of agencies with technical expertise. A judge with no scientific background should decide the best reading of dictating how pollution is acceptable in our air, lakes, or rivers rather than scientists.

These decisions have real implications for people across the country. These are the rules that protect our drinking water and keep our workplaces safe. In the end, it wasn't a Federal judge who was helped by the DC Circuit's reliance on Chevron in interpreting a Labor Department rule. It was an hourly Minnesota grocery store worker who got to keep his hard-earned pension.

As a granddaughter of a miner, I can tell you that it wasn't a CEO or a corporate board chair whose life was saved by mining safety rules. It was the Minnesota iron ore workers who, like my grandpa, would go down in a cage, 1,500 feet underground, every single day with their black lunch bucket. That is what my grandpa did every day. All my grandpa, who never got to even graduate from high school, wanted was to send my dad and his brother to college. My dad ended up as the first kid in his family to graduate from college--a community college, a 2-year community college. From there he went to the University of Minnesota and got his 4-year degree--all that because my grandpa went down in that mining cage and saved money in a coffee can in his basement to send my dad to college.

Everyone would gather at the mines and run over there every time the sirens went off because it meant someone died or someone was hurt. My dad still remembers the coffins in St. Anthony's Church lined up in the front. That is what workplace safety rules have changed.

It was the worker protections, coupled with the ability to organize a union, that finally made those miners' jobs safer. Americans rely on these protections to keep them healthy and safe, and we can't have a Supreme Court Justice who would throw those protections in doubt.

The final point I would make about the legal record is what would happen to our antitrust laws. In recent years, the Supreme Court has made it harder and harder to enforce the Nation's antitrust laws when you have big consolidations and market dominance. There are cases called Trinko, Twombly, Leegin, and Ohio v. American Express. There has been a whole series of them.

Why does that matter to us? It matters. It couldn't be happening at a more troubling time. We are seeing this wave of industry mergers. Americans know it in their own life. Companies are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We have now two companies that have surpassed $1 trillion. Annual merger filings with our agencies here in Washington have increased by more than 50 percent in just the last 5 years.

So we already have a Court that is going conservative right when I think Americans need this protection, but, instead, we have a judge that is before us today that has written two major cases in this area. Both of them were even more conservative than where the Court was. Both of them made it even harder for mergers to be checked by the Federal Trade Commission--even by a Federal Trade Commission that was run by the Republicans. They thought the merger was troubling in one case. They brought it to court. This judge went the opposite way.

Our exchange in the hearing did not convince me that the American people and all those in favor of strong antitrust enforcement that promotes competition and protects consumers should not be concerned.

I think back to my favorite game growing up--Monopoly. The basic premise of ``the more you own, the more you made'' has always been true in American capitalism. If you monopolized the board by buying up multiple properties in the same color or all those railroads, you could take your opponents out of the game.

What does that mean today? Well, the failed merger between Norfolk Southern Railway and Canadian Pacific, something I took on only immediately when it was announced--we defeated that. But even without that merger, where are we today? Ninety percent of the freight rail traffic is handled by only four railroads. That is the same number of railroads on the Monopoly board. I don't think that is a coincidence.

So as we look at his rulings in this area, we realize this isn't just a game. No, this is our economy, and we want judges who are a check and balance, just as the Founders wanted. The Founders cared a lot about monopoly, actually, and they wanted a check and balance in our courts. They set up an independent judiciary.

The last point I want to focus on is Judge Kavanaugh's record and his views on campaign finance.

I requested a number of these campaign finance documents to become public because I thought they raised serious concerns about Judge Kavanaugh's views in this area of law. I actually got those documents public, and it is one of the reasons that a number of my colleagues who are opposed to the judge have been able to talk about those records right here on the floor and the public has been able to see them.

In one email from March of 2002, he discussed limits on contributions to candidates saying--these are his words: ``And I have heard very few people say that the limits on contributions to candidates are unconstitutional, although I for one tend to think those limits have some constitutional problems.'' That is a big deal because we have very few campaign finance laws left that allow us to be protected from dark money and unlimited money coming into companies.

He also described in another email his ``1A''--that is the First Amendment--views as ``pure.'' This is very concerning when it comes to campaign finance. I have serious doubts, based on his record, as to whether he thinks that Congress has the authority to pass any campaign finance reform and take action to rein in the flood of dark money that has drowned out the voices of ordinary citizens.

What does that mean? Well, when the Court stripped away the rules that opened that door to unlimited super-PAC spending--and that is what we have right now--it wasn't the campaign financiers or the ad men who were hurt. No, it was the grandma in Lanesboro, MN, who thought it mattered when she sent in $10 to support her Senator. That is what we are dealing with, and if we get even narrower or get rid of all the limits on campaign finance, it is only going to get worse.

The American people would not have even known about Judge Kavanaugh's extreme views on campaign finance if I had not sought to have those documents made public. That is because there are still 186,000 pages of documents that have been produced to the Judiciary Committee, but they have not been made available to the American people.

Let me put it another way. Even now, only about 7 percent of Judge Kavanaugh's White House record has been produced to the Judiciary Committee, and even less--that is about 4 percent--is available to all of you, to the public.

On top of that, we are missing 3 years of documents from his time as Staff Secretary. So we have no records to review from that part of Judge Kavanaugh's previous work in the White House.

We also don't have 102,000 pages of documents that the White House has withheld under a claim of constitutional privilege, even though executive privilege has never been used to block the release of Presidential records to the Senate during a Supreme Court nomination under Presidents from both parties.

As a former prosecutor, I know that no lawyer goes to court without reviewing the evidence and the record, and a good judge would not decide a case with only 7 percent of the key documents.

In fact, as I mentioned, we received 42,000 documents the night before. We could not even look at them when we were starting to ask him questions because we had only gotten them the night before.

So I asked him if he thought that a judge would grant a continuance in a situation like that when one party dumped 42,000 pages of documents on the other the night before trial. I didn't get much of an answer.

We have already learned that the information in documents from Judge Kavanaugh's time in the White House is relevant to our consideration of his nomination. We should have those documents before we have this vote, but we don't.

Having full information about the judge's record brings me to the compelling testimony of Dr. Ford. Since Dr. Ford came forward, we have all thought a lot about our justice system. Before I got to the Senate, I was the Hennepin County Attorney in Minnesota. In that job, we used to say that we were ministers of justice and that that meant that we would work to convict the guilty but also to protect the innocent.

I hope my colleagues think about this question tomorrow: Are we truly protecting the innocent in how we are moving forward? What have we done?

A critical part of carrying out justice is having a fair process. That is something that Judge Kavanaugh himself has repeatedly and publicly said he wants.

I appreciate Dr. Ford's willingness to come before the Judiciary Committee last week, but it was unfortunate that she had to do it before the White House had asked for the FBI to reopen its background investigation and follow up on what she had said.

When I think of my work, we always would have those investigations and that information before any kind of a hearing. Back in Minnesota, our office handled all the judicial matters in our county from the juvenile area. In fact, we had about 12,000 cases every year, as well as all adult felonies. We investigated reports like Dr. Ford's. That job gave me a window into how these types of cases hurt women and impact everyone.

I would always tell those stories of those coming before us. I would tell them: You know what. This is going to be hard. You have to tell your story to a jury box of strangers, but you are doing it for justice. You are doing it for the right reason.

As for Dr. Ford, she had to tell her story to a nation. It was a moment. So many people in our country were watching her. I don't think people thought they were going to believe her when they first went in there and they first turned on their TVs, but then they watched her. They watched her grace and her dignity.

But, then, sadly, in the afternoon, for my colleagues on the other side, we saw a lot of anger and chest beating. I believe the strategy was to distract and deflect from the moving and incredible testimony of someone who told her story to the Nation.

This was a woman with no political background, who made an attempt to call the front office of her congressional Representative. That is all she did. All this stuff about her being part of some kind of smear campaign--she did it even before he was a nominee. She had read that he was one of the people under consideration, and she thought she should warn people.

Now, she wanted her name confidential. She explained all that during the hearing. She simply called the front desk of her congressional Representative.

This wasn't the first time that the Senate had confronted this type of situation. When Anita Hill came forward with her allegations against then-Judge Clarence Thomas, President George H.W. Bush immediately requested that the FBI reopen its background investigation.

Dr. Ford was another person who made a credible claim. Chairman Grassley actually thanked her for her bravery in coming forward last week. Several of my Republican colleagues talked about how much they respected her.

Well, I said: You know, if you really want to respect her and you really want to be brave, then, you at least have to give her the modicum of respect by following up on her allegations, and that should have been done the minute that letter went public.

I found out about it, by the way, on the very same day that my Republican colleagues found out about it, and that was just a few weeks ago. I have heard a lot of complaints about that, and I am not going to get into that issue except to say one thing: The justice system is messy. Things come out at the very last minute sometimes. Evidence comes out before trial, but the issue is, When that happens, what do you do with it? What do you do with it when you are in a position of power? Do you just sweep it under the rug, as has happened too many times in this Chamber, in this building? No, you give them a chance to make their case, but also to give them that underlying investigation, and you reopen a background check--not a criminal background check, simply a background check like we do for any other high-level nomination in the Senate.

As I told my colleagues last week, if you want to make a political speech about keeping nominees off the floor, here is exhibit A for you: Merrick Garland, 10 months. For 10 months he was kept off the floor. Yet people have acted in a sanctimonious way that this was some cataclysmic event--to simply go back in and do an FBI investigation.

Dr. Ford's testimony was powerful. I asked her not about what she remembers about that night but what she couldn't forget. Here is what she said:

The stairwell. The living room. The bedroom. The bed on the right side of the room. . . . The bathroom in close proximity. The laughter, the uproarious laughter.

We also heard from Dr. Ford about how she came forward because she felt she had a civic duty, just like we have a civic duty to look at the record that I just laid out for you in the last hour. That is our civic duty. That is why she came forward.

She talked about how she brought this up in therapy 6 years before and how she had given her husband the name of Judge Kavanaugh. This is before he was famous. This is before he was up for the Supreme Court.

As a former prosecutor, I understand the critical role that law enforcement has in gathering the information necessary to evaluate reports like this one. I don't like living in an evidence-free zone, and while I am glad the White House reopened the background check and at least went in and talked to some of the witnesses, if you go down there--which you can't do, but I could do and the other Senators could do--you realize, and you can see this from the public reports, that a lot of people weren't interviewed. For a lot of the names from Dr. Ford and one of the other victims involved in some allegations, Ms. Ramirez, they were not able to have those witnesses interviewed. That is what you see when you are down there. So this was not a fair process that Judge Kavanaugh said he wanted and that Dr. Ford wanted.

What we heard from the judge later in the day could not have been a sharper contrast from what we heard from Dr. Ford in the morning. She told her story, and it was a story that so many times in our Nation's history has been, as I said, swept under the rug because for so long, people have been told that what happens in a house should never end up in a courthouse.

Now what we can say to Dr. Ford is, well, this may not end up the way you wanted it, and it may not feel worth it to have come forward to have your life turned upside down. But you know what--there is one reason it was worth it, and that is because the American people learned something and they are speaking out because the times, they are a changing.

To conclude, I want to return to some of the thoughts on what this nomination means at this uncertain moment in our history. This nomination comes before us at a time when we are witnessing seismic shifts in our democracy. Foundational elements of our government, including the rule of law, have been challenged and undermined. Today our democracy faces threats that would have seemed unbelievable not long ago.

A man who was appointed special counsel in the investigation that is going on right now involving a foreign country interfering in our democracy--a man who served with distinction under Presidents from both parties--is under siege. Dedicated persons in the Justice Department are under siege. A third branch of government--our courts and our individual judges--has been under assault, not by a solitary disappointed litigant but by the President of the United States.

Our democracy is on trial. It is our duty to carry on the American constitutional tradition that John Adams stood up for centuries ago, and that is to be ``a government of laws and not of men.''

The next Supreme Court Justice should serve as a check on the other branches of government, someone who is fairminded and independent, who will uphold the motto on the Supreme Court building to help all Americans achieve ``equal justice under law.''

We have all thought a lot about the separation of powers in the last few weeks. All the attacks on the rule of law and our justice system have made me--and, I would guess, some of my other colleagues--pause and think many times about why we decided to come to the Senate in the first place, and in my case, why I decided to go into law in the first place. So I went back and I found an essay that I had written back in high school.

I can tell you that not many girls in my high school class said they dreamed of being a lawyer. We had no lawyers in our family, and both of my parents were the first in their families to go to college. But somehow, when I was in high school, my dad convinced me to spend a morning sitting in a courtroom and watching a State court district judge handle a routine calendar of criminal cases. The judge took pleas, listened to arguments, and handed out misdemeanor sentences. It was nothing glamorous--and nothing glamorous like the judge before us is being nominated to do--but it was important just the same.

I realized that morning that behind each and every case, no matter how small, there was a story, a person. Each and every decision that judge made that day affected someone's life, and I noticed how he had to make gut decisions and try his best to take account of what his decisions would mean.

There is something I said back then in that essay that I still believe today, and that is this: To be part of an imperfect system, to have a chance to better that system, was and is a cause worth fighting for, a job worth doing.

Our government is far from perfect, and so is our legal system, and so was this hearing, but we are at a crossroads in our Nation's history where we must make a choice: Are we going to dedicate ourselves to improving the justice system or not? Is this nominee going to administer the law with equal justice as it applies to all citizens regardless of whether they live in a poor neighborhood or a rich one, in a small house or the White House?

Many Americans are troubled today. When they watched the hearing, they were given some hope. They wanted to be fair, and they wanted due process, and I get that, but they also saw the blind partisanship of Washington and its crushing weight.

For many of us, this nomination process does not look like it is going to end the way we want it to, but Dr. Ford opened a window on sexual assault that is never going to be closed. Anyone who works here knows they have heard stories, and people tell stories they had never told before. Then there are those who want to see change in government. Well, they opened a door that will never close, and we welcome them. We need some new people around here.

So I am going to end with a quote from a song I listened to this morning, and it is a Minnesotan--not Prince; it is Bob Dylan. He was born in Duluth, and he grew up very close to where my dad grew up on the Iron Range of Minnesota. These are the last words of his song:

As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading, and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a changing.

And they are changing. People's reactions to what happened this week and their focus on government and their focus on making things better-- that is changing.

As I said last Friday at the committee hearing, the Constitution does not say ``we the ruling party''; the Constitution says ``We the People.'' And last week, the American people responded like never before. They stood up for something real, for something larger than themselves, for the hope of tomorrow. So that is how we the people prevail, because the times, they are a changing.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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