Nominations

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, next week, the Judiciary Committee will hear firsthand from President Biden's Supreme Court nominee Judge Jackson. It will be a serious and dignified process. The American people need answers to more important questions than what somebody wrote in the nominee's high school yearbook.

The Senate needs to examine Judge Jackson's qualifications, and we need to examine her judicial philosophy and see if she will apply laws as written and weigh cases without favoritism. And we need to explore why the farthest left activists in the country desperately wanted Judge Jackson, in particular, for this vacancy.

Judicial philosophy is a key qualification for the Supreme Court. There are plenty of smart lawyers in the country, but they don't all understand that a judge's proper role is to apply the text of the laws neutrally. Some would rather start with liberal outcomes and reason backward.

So it is unsettling that senior Democrats have lauded Judge Jackson for the ``empathy'' they suggest shapes her judicial approach. So if you are the litigant for whom the judge has special preexisting empathy, well, it is your lucky day; but the other party is being denied their fair day in court.

The Senate Democratic leader, the House majority whip, and multiple legal academics all say Judge Jackson will rule with ``empathy.'' Helpfully, one professor clarified which kinds of litigants would benefit from her empathy. He proposed that because of Judge Jackson's ``ample criminal defense experience,'' she would ``bring a measure of empathy to the criminal defense cases, the Fourth and Fifth Amendment cases.''

So liberals are saying that Judge Jackson's service as a criminal defense lawyer and then on the U.S. Sentencing Commission give her special empathy for convicted criminals. Her supporters look at her resume and deduce a special empathy for criminals. I guess that means that government prosecutors and innocent crime victims start each trial at a disadvantage.

That isn't my assertion. That is what the nominee's liberal supporters are all saying. In fact, the nominee has all but said it herself. Here is what the Washington Post reported last year when Judge Jackson was nominated to the DC Circuit:

She and her allies credit her work as a public defender as helping her develop empathy.

And here they quote the nominee herself:

There is a direct line from my defender service to what I do on the bench, and I think it's beneficial.

So, look, nobody is saying that public defenders ought to be disqualified from judicial service. It is an important role. But as the New York Times reported this week, the Biden administration is on an intentional quest to stuff the Federal judiciary full of this one perspective. Even amid a national crime wave, a disproportionate share of the new judges President Biden has nominated share this professional background that liberals say gives judges special empathy for criminal defendants.

Here is the New York Times:

It is a sea change in the world of judicial nominations. . . . The type of high-profile murder cases handled by some of Mr. Biden's nominees would have been considered disqualifying only a few years ago; now the president . . . is actively seeking to name more jurists who have such experience.

It is not just Judge Jackson.

At least 20 other lawyers with significant public defender experience have been nominated by the Biden administration.

One soft-on-crime advocate marveled to the reporter:

We have never seen anything like this.

Such enthusiasm.

President Biden is deliberately working to make the whole Federal judiciary softer on crime. Even liberals admitted as much. They actually applaud it. But with murders and carjackings skyrocketing nationwide, I doubt the American people feel the same way.

I look forward to learning more about how Judge Jackson believes her service as a criminal defense attorney leads her to interpret the text of our laws and our Constitution differently than other judges. If any judicial nominee really does have special empathy for some parties over others, that is not an asset; it is a problem. Energy

Madam President, on another matter, as Democratic policies have unleashed runaway inflation, families have felt particular pain at the gas pump.

Since President Biden took office, gas prices have climbed nearly $2--$2. The Biden administration wants to claim that a full year's worth of price hikes were all caused by a war Putin started 3 weeks ago. But this fictional version of events doesn't fool anyone.

Two years ago, then-candidate Biden told everyone he was ready to wage war on the most reliable forms of American energy:

No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. [It] ends.

That is President Biden.

I guarantee you . . . We're going to end fossil fuel.

In other words, either the Biden administration has a shaky understanding of supply and demand or soaring energy prices have been baked into their agenda right from the beginning.

For 14 months now, energy policy has followed a disturbing pattern. First, the Biden administration rolls out a direct attack on American energy, then working families feel the pinch, and then Democrats try to deflect the blame. Take the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Biden made canceling it a day one priority. Then, as gasoline, diesel, and other energy prices climbed, the White House justified itself by saying the project would have taken years to affect prices anyway.

The problem is, back during the Obama administration, their own analysis suggested the project would be fully operational by 2013. They spent a decade fighting against a pipeline that would have taken a couple of years to come online by complaining it was not immediate enough.

That was their argument a decade ago, and it is their argument now. The pipeline could have been built multiple times over in the time the Democrats spent resisting it. Besides, if slow construction were really the problem, the administration would be rushing to rein in their own regulatory army that is handcuffing other new and existing pipelines with mountains of extra bureaucracy.

Just weeks ago, while Putin was already amassing forces and trying to make energy hostages out of Western Europe, the Biden administration's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission went out of its way to make permitting new American natural gas pipelines radically more difficult.

Here is yet another example. Last year, the Biden administration directed the SEC to prioritize discouraging loans, capital, and financing for fossil fuel energy projects. But now that a worldwide scramble has sent prices sky-high, the administration blames the industry and says it is ``time for oil and gas companies to work with Wall Street to unleash our productive capacity.'' The administration that campaigned on ending fossil fuels now claims the fossil fuel companies are just layabouts who don't want to drill. It is enough to make your head spin.

Oh, and President Biden rushed to lash America back to the mast of a climate deal that actually gave China a pass to keep increasing their emissions. As Germany prepared to give Putin an even tighter hold on Europe's market for natural gas with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, President Biden fought bipartisan efforts to stop the pipeline.

His response to soaring prices hurting families last year was to go hat in hand and beg OPEC and Russia to produce more. And now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration is reportedly exploring more imports--listen to this--from Venezuela and Iran, totalitarian regimes with contempt for human rights and the environment.

So it turns out the Biden administration doesn't mind fossil fuel production after all. They just don't want to ``Buy American.'' The administration will buy oil from the Supreme Leader of Iran; they will buy oil from Maduro. If North Korea had oil, they would probably try to buy that, too. Anything--anything--to avoid keeping those jobs and that energy independence right here in the USA.

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