Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, once again, I would like to respond to the Senator from Texas as he continues to hold the position that the Democrats on this side of the aisle simply oppose all of the President's nominees because they happen to be this lying President's nominees. That is not the case at all.
Donald Trump has consistently thought to nominate people to his Cabinet who he believes will do his bidding and protect his interests. Once confirmed, if these Cabinet Secretaries displease him, out they go--Jeff Sessions, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson.
The President believes William Barr will be an Attorney General who will protect him. Why does the President believe that? Because William Barr auditioned for this position. How? Mr. Barr wrote a highly unusual and factually unsupported, unsolicited 19-page memo to the Sessions Justice Department, arguing that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not be permitted to interrogate the President about obstruction of justice. Nobody asked him to weigh in.
He admits he didn't have any facts or inside information, and, in fact, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein chose not to discuss the matter with him, but Mr. Barr felt compelled not only to put his views in writing and send them to the Department of Justice, but he also made sure the President's lawyers knew his views. His memo sent a clear message to this President that he would protect Donald Trump from the Mueller probe.
Once Donald Trump did nominate him for Attorney General, after having earlier offered him a job as his personal attorney--virtually the same job in Donald Trump's mind--Mr. Barr came to the Judiciary Committee and continued to signal his willingness to shield Trump from scrutiny.
First, he refused to commit to follow the advice of career ethics officials on the question of recusal from the Trump investigations. He didn't want to make the same mistake Jeff Sessions did and open himself up to Presidential humiliation, no matter what the ethics experts recommended.
Second, he refused to commit to make public Special Counsel Mueller's report. In both instances, he said he wanted to keep his options open, leave himself room to make his own decisions, and trust his ultimate judgment.
While these answers were reassuring to the President, they certainly were not to those of us who want an Attorney General independent of a President who does not believe the rule of law applies to him. When asked at his hearing, Mr. Barr should have affirmatively committed to allowing all active investigations to continue until the prosecutors say they are done. That includes the special counsel's investigation, as well as the probes being conducted by, again, at least three U.S. attorney's offices. Instead, he gave his usual equivocal response.
Of course, these are all active investigations having to do with Mr. Trump and his activities. Barr's position on these investigations is consistent with his views on the unitary Executive. He has long endorsed a view that the President is an all-powerful Executive, restrained by very little, least of all by Congress. This is a very dangerous view for the Attorney General to have, especially at a time when we have a President who attacks and undermines the rule of law.
Mr. Barr's views on the Trump investigations and the unitary Executive aren't the only reason he should not be confirmed as Attorney General. His agreement with this administration's immigration policy also, in my view, disqualifies him. There was no daylight between Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions on immigration. Mr. Barr has given every indication that he will follow the lead of Jeff Sessions and of Matthew Whitaker in aggressively implementing, basically, Stephen Miller's extreme immigration policies.
As George H.W. Bush's Attorney General, Barr played a key role in the Justice Department's policy in the early 1990s of detaining HIV- positive Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay. These refugees were held in prison-like living conditions and denied medical treatment until a Federal court ruled that their indefinite detention was illegal.
More recently, in November 2018, Mr. Barr cowrote an op-ed with the title ``We Salute Jeff Sessions,'' full of praise for Sessions' tenure at DOJ, including on immigration. Mr. Barr praised Sessions for ``attack[ing] the rampant illegality that riddled our immigration system, breaking the record for prosecution of illegal-entry cases,'' and increasing prosecution of ``immigrants who reentered the country illegally'' by 38 percent.
These statements are deeply concerning because as Attorney General, Mr. Sessions implemented policies that are abhorrent and in direct opposition to American values.
Sessions instituted the zero-tolerance policy--a stain on our Nation that resulted in thousands of children being separated from their families, many of whom may never be reunited. This country, under Jeff Sessions, made instant orphans out of thousands of children. That is hardly a value that I think any of us can support.
At his hearing, Mr. Barr also embraced key aspects of the Trump- Miller immigration agenda, including endorsing Donald Trump's vanity wall; attacking cities that refused to undermine their own anti-crime efforts by cooperating with the Federal Government's draconian policies; agreeing with the Trump administration's atrocious treatment of legal asylum seekers; joining President Trump in criticizing judges for blocking the President's Muslim travel ban; and astoundingly, refusing to say whether birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution, telling me, when I asked him this, that he hadn't ``looked at that legally.'' What is there to look at? The Fourteenth Amendment plainly states that all persons ``born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'' Nullifying birthright citizenship would violate the Constitution and impact millions, but it is certainly something the President wants done.
Mr. Barr's record and position on some of DOJ's other important responsibilities, such as enforcing civil rights laws, defending laws enacted by Congress, and protecting established constitutional rights, are unacceptable to me in the Nation's top law enforcement officer.
Some examples include: Mr. Barr's refusal to admit that voter fraud is incredibly rare and his focusing on so-called voter fraud problems rather than voter suppression problems. States are very busy continuing to pass laws that should be attacked as a silly veiled effort at voter suppression, but that is not where Mr. Barr is; his stand that LGBTQ people are not protected from employment discrimination under Federal civil rights laws, contrary to what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and two Federal courts have held; his personal involvement in two challenges to major premises of the Affordable Care Act; his record of belief that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, including his statement that this landmark Supreme Court case guaranteeing a woman's right to choose, as he put it, was a ``secularist'' effort to ``eliminate laws that reflect traditional norms.'' At a time when the newest Trump-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court have demonstrated a hostility toward a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, such an anti-choice Attorney General is a danger to women.
In some of his academic writings, William Barr expressed his dismay at the moral decay of American society, but when I asked him at his hearing, he testified that he didn't have any problems with a President who lies every single day and has undermined so many of America's most important institutions such as the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community.
An Attorney General is a member of the President's Cabinet and is entitled to enforce the administration's policies, but in this instance, the policies this President pursues are often pushed beyond the constitutional breaking point and just as often are plain cruel; i.e., the separation of children from their parents at the border, making them instant orphans.
The Attorney General's independence is critical in normal times, but it is absolutely essential in these times that are anything but normal that his independence cannot be questioned. Sadly, I cannot say that.
I cannot support William Barr's nomination. I urge my colleagues to vote against his confirmation.
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