Judicial Nominations

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the Constitution charges the Senate with giving advice and, if we choose, providing our consent to the President's judicial appointments.

The President nominates somebody whom he thinks ought to serve on the Federal bench, and then the nominee comes here to the Senate for a job interview. Sometimes these job interviews make news because they go spectacularly well.

When the Judiciary Committee subjected now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett to a battery of questions a little over 2 years ago, she literally dazzled the country with her force of intellect. At one point, hours into a hearing, after being asked multipart questions about the finer points of constitutional law, now-Justice Barrett was asked to hold up the notepad she had been provided to keep everything straight, and it was completely blank. She hadn't even touched it.

Justice Barrett is an intellectual outlier by any standard, but she is an appropriate stand-in for the judicial nominees whom Republican Senators confirmed from 2017 through 2020. As one left-leaning analysis admitted in 2020, ``based solely on objective legal credentials''-- ``solely on objective legal credentials''--the last administration's average pick for the Federal bench had ``a far more impressive resume than any past president's nominees.'' They had more circuit court clerkships, more Supreme Court clerkships--objectively, more experience in the Federal judiciary.

Under President Biden, though, with his nominees, well, you might say things have gone somewhat differently.

Last week, our colleague on the Judiciary Committee from Louisiana, Senator Kennedy, was quizzing a panel of President Biden's nominees, and he decided to try some very simple questions that should have been beyond basic for anybody nominated to serve as a U.S. district judge. He asked one nominee, currently a superior court judge in Spokane County, WA, to simply explain what article V of the Constitution says. That would be the article that explains how the Constitution gets amended. Here was the nominee's response:

Article V is not coming to mind at the moment.

Senator Kennedy came back with another, even more basic question. He asked:

How about article II?

As high schoolers across America learn each year, article II sets up the Presidency and the executive branch. It establishes the President's powers, including the power to nominate the person for the vacancy in question. But this sitting judge drew another blank. Article II wasn't coming to mind either--goodness gracious.

Then she flunked yet another question about legal philosophy, and, then again, she flunked still another question about the most controversial Supreme Court case this term.

Apparently, when this particular nominee had been asked to list the top 10 most impactful cases she had litigated in court, she could only come up with 6. At no stage of her professional career has the judge focused on Federal law. At no point had she ever even appeared in Federal court.

So get this. In one of these six most significant cases she took, she lost to a defendant who forewent legal counsel and took the risky step of representing herself. This wasn't some rooky mistake either. The nominee was over a decade out of law school when she lost to an unrepresented party in one of her biggest cases.

Is this the caliber of legal expert with which President Biden is filling the Federal bench--for lifetime appointments? Is the bar for merit and excellence really set this low?

For years, now, Washington Democrats' rhetoric about judicial nominations has often treated actual qualifications as an afterthought. Democrats were not particularly impressed or moved by top-shelf professional excellence or the academic brilliance that the last Republican administration's nominees possessed, literally, in spades. And, apparently, they don't count those qualities as particularly high priorities now that they are the ones doing the nominating.

The American people deserve an impartial judiciary that is full of the finest legal minds our country has to offer. The American people deserve the best and the brightest.

Alas, but sadly, the Biden administration's questionable constitutional judgment is not limited to some of their judicial nominations. In one important constitutional case after another, the Biden administration and his lawyers have come down on the wrong side of the American people's rights and liberties and have gotten slapped down in court as a result.

This last year, for example, in the Bruen case, the Biden administration threw its weight behind unconstitutional New York State restrictions on the Second Amendment that plainly violated citizens' rights to keep and bear arms. President Biden sent one of his top lawyers to help with the oral arguments, but the Democrats got the Constitution backward and lost the case.

In West Virginia v. EPA, President Biden went all in trying to defend massive unconstitutional overreach by his own Environmental Protection Agency. His Solicitor General argued the case herself, but the administration lost badly. The plain meaning of our laws and our Constitution actually won out.

In Carson v. Makin, President Biden fought to maintain unconstitutional anti-religious discrimination in school voucher programs. Again, he lost, and the American people and their Constitution won.

Washington Democrats had their blatantly unconstitutional vaccine mandate for the private sector tossed out by the Supreme Court. They had their obviously illegal top-down mask mandate for transportation tossed out by a district judge. Oh, and, by the way, when the judge was nominated, Democrats howled that she was unqualified. But with a Supreme Court clerkship under her belt, she had incomparably more experience in Federal court than the nominee who failed Senator Kennedy's bar exam.

Over and over, on issue after issue, this Democratic administration sides against the American people, against the Constitution, and against the rule of law.

The American people deserve an administration that respects their rights and liberties, that understands our Constitution, and that chooses both policies and nominees accordingly.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source