Department of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2004

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, JUSTICE, AND STATE, THE JUDICIARY AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004

Mr. SCHUMER. I want to first tell my colleague I have been watching him in the other room, and he has been doing a masterful job on the CJS bill, and now on what has happened in the first 1,000 days of the Bush Presidency.

An area of particular concern to me, which I know my colleague has touched on, has been the judges. I simply ask my colleague if he says the judicial vacancies-it is on the chart. I can't read it, but I think it is down from 9 percent to 4.7 percent. He has been around here a lot longer time than I have. But does my colleague recall a time when we moved so many-knowing his knowledge of the history of the Senate-judges so quickly and when any President could have gotten such a high percentage of the judges which he has asked for? Does my colleague agree with this? He might want to talk about this at some point. He was talking about the gag rule, but I was so interested in what he said on judges I wanted to come to the floor.

It is ridiculous, when 168 of 172 judges have been approved, to call the minority "obstructionists" given the record they have. I am hearing from many people in New York that we are letting too many judges through.

Mr. REID. I am happy to respond to my friend. I will answer my friend, the distinguished Senator from New York, who is the ranking member of the subcommittee that has the burdensome job of weighing the merits and demerits of each of these
judges. It is a difficult job.

The Senator has sifted pretty hard. There have been 168 judges come through your subcommittee of the full committee that have been approved. I say to my friend, the mystery as far as I am concerned is we are going to spend 30 hours starting Wednesday night and going until Thursday at midnight on 4 judges who have not been approved by the ranking member's subcommittee and the full committee.

I cannot imagine how we could do better. We have the lowest vacancy rate in some 15 years. We have approved, I repeat, 168 judges.

My friend is absolutely right. This side of the aisle is being criticized because too many bad judges are getting through. We have made a decision to only take the worst of the worst. That is why we stick together on these so well. We do not turn down everybody. We turned down less than 2 percent.

As I said earlier today, rather than turning down 2 percent, if we turn down 1.5 percent of the judges, would that cut the time down for taking away from valuable Senate time to maybe 25 hours? If we cut the rate down to 99 percent, maybe they would cut it down to 15 hours. Does this mean the Constitution of the United States says we should approve every judge they give to us? We are the minority. There are 49 of us. It does not take a mathematical scientist to tell you they vote en bloc. Once in a while we get a courageous Senator who joins in judges, but that is a rarity.

We have under the rules of this body something called cloture. It is used all the time. It has been used with judges before. We have used very discriminately, rarely, our ability to block judges. We have done it four times. That does not prevent them from getting a vote on the judge. They just have to get 60 votes. They have to get 60 votes. They have not been able to do that. That is why they are lamenting these four.

I don't know if the Senator from New York was here earlier today when I talked about the huge number of unemployed we have in America today, approaching 10 million. Wouldn't it be nice if we spent that 30 hours, or part of it, talking about the unemployed in America today instead of the 4 people who have good jobs? Miguel Estrada makes over half a million yearly, the others make about half a million a year. They are judges and have jobs. None of them are out of work. Rather than spend 30 hours on people who have jobs, shouldn't we spend time on people who do not have jobs? Would it not be better that we spend some time talking about minimum wage? I have talked about it a little bit today. I had to be careful what I talked about the first 3 hours; it had to be directly on the bill. As I told the staff earlier, later I may want to talk about the color of the ties and the color of her pretty shoes. We can talk about all kinds of things. Now the rules are that I can talk about anything.

One of the things that is not just anything is minimum wage. Wouldn't it be nice if people who went to work in interstate commerce in America, which covers it all, got at least $5.30 an hour, $5.50 an hour, or $6 an hour? The rate now is $5.15. They will not give us a vote on that. I would hope we could spend part of that 30 hours on minimum wage.

My friend from Michigan is here. The Senate is a much better place now that we have women in the Senate. I speak from experience. It is a much better place.

Minimum wage is not just employment for a kid flipping hamburgers at McDonald's. Sixty percent of the workers who draw minimum wage are women, and a majority of the women need that money for their families. Would it not be nice if we spent time doing some work for our hard-working people who are doing everything they can to make a living? Most of these minimum-wage jobs certainly have no benefits, no pension benefits, they have no medical benefits. They are bad jobs,
but they are jobs. They are jobs the American people need.

It is important we do something that is worth the dignity of the Senate. I don't know how the history books will report this. Here we are, a country that is staggering in debt. We started off with a national surplus when Clinton left office of over $7 trillion. We have now a debt of $5 trillion. When President Clinton was President the last 3 or 4 years, we were actually spending less money than we were taking in. We were paying down the debt. Now we are building the debt. We will have the largest debt in the history of this country this year, the largest deficit.

The percentage of unemployed is going up; poor people, going up; uninsured, going up. Everything we should be working on is going up, and we should be trying to get these percentages down. But we will not talk about that. We are going to talk about judicial vacancies, which are going down. How in the world can people take the Senate seriously when we have a world that is overcome with pollution, crime, kids cannot go to school, public schools are beaten down, old, decrepit, teachers need help, we have a war going on in Iraq-I don't know how many were killed over the weekend-and we are going to spend 30 hours talking about 4 people the dastardly Democrats turned down. How could they vote against these people? We are going to spend 30 hours. How is history going to account for the time we spent on this?

Mr. SCHUMER. Will my colleague yield for the purpose of one additional question.

Mr. REID. I will yield for a question without losing the floor, and if the question exceeds more than 3 minutes I will retake the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.

Mr. SCHUMER. Even on the issue of judges, and my colleague is exactly on point, with all these other problems we have, to talk about four judges sounds like a totally misplaced priority. No one puts it better than he.

I ask one other question about another point. To solve the problem of the judges, when we are not able to come together, it would seem to me, and I ask my good friend from Nevada to comment, it is not that we need more talking. The other side will spend 30 hours talking about this, or now maybe 15 because of my friend from Nevada and his astute parliamentary request. Do you think they will say anything new? We have heard the arguments over and over and over and over and over and over again. No one is going to be educated about this. We all know their viewpoint.

It seems to me, and I ask my colleague this question, what we need on judges is not more speeches telling us what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle think-Lord knows we know that. We do not agree, but we know-but, rather, the President and the leaders of the Senate and the Judiciary Committee, sitting down with our side, and asking, Could we come to some agreement on who the judges ought to be? There is the constitutional role of advice and consent which has existed in this country for a very long time, and I tell the Senator as the ranking Democrat, I am never consulted about judges in New York. By the way, in New York we are filling all the vacancies because we have come to an agreement. I do not get every judge I want or even judges who are philosophically exactly like me, but there is some comity and some agreement.

So my question to my colleague is, Doesn't it seem that if they really want to solve the problem on the judges, instead of spending 30 hours repeating, ad nauseam, the same arguments we have heard over and over and over again, that, rather, they would sit down with us and, in good faith, say: How can we come to some kind of agreement instead of what they do say: My way or the highway. If you don't give us all 172, we're mad. I ask my colleague that question and yield the floor back to him.

Mr. REID. I say to my friend, we take an oath right over here, each one of us. We raise our hand and swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I think one of the requirements I have is to advise and give consent to the President, as outlined in the Constitution of the United States. I think it would be better for him, but I do not understand this administration. They just want to jam us on everything.

Now, as I said to the ranking member of the committee the Senator from Vermont, earlier today, I do not like all the judges you guys have put out, quite frankly. I do not like some of them, I say through the Chair to my friend from New York. But I understand it is a winnowing process, and we have only been asked to respond to the worst of the worst.

Now, Miguel Estrada, I do not say he is a bad person. All I say is, if he wants a job, fill out the job application and give us the information so we know for whom we are voting. He could be the nicest guy in the world. I never met him. I have nothing against him personally. But he would have set a very bad standard for this country by just saying: I don't have to answer anything. I don't have to fill out this application. Those papers you wanted, no deal. President Bush said I don't have to answer them. I'm not going to answer them. He said: I don't have to give you that information-even though they have been given before, by Bork and others, Civiletti.

So I say to my friend, we, in turning down Estrada, Owen, Pryor, and Pickering, did our constitutional duty in and what we believed were bad people for good jobs. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we should spend 30 hours talking about those people. As my friend from New York has said, I have heard the speeches-I have been here-about how they have been maltreated, they want an up-or-down vote-even though we had our own judges, and they did not give us up-or-down votes.

I read something from the majority leader today-he sends out to a lot of people e-mail that I get here, among others-that never has there been a filibuster of a Federal judge before. Absolutely false. Whoever gives the majority leader that information should be embarrassed because it is simply not true. I have been on the Senate floor when there have been filibusters. We had cloture motions filed, and we voted on them.

So we are going to go through this deal on Wednesday and into Thursday-a waste of valuable time that we could be spending on these things that are going up that should have been going down, such as the uninsured.

In my first elective job-I was first a city attorney, and that was an appointed job. Many years ago, my first elected job, in 1966, was to be on the board of trustees of the then-largest hospital district in Nevada, Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital. Now it is a teaching hospital. It was not then.

At that time I learned a lot about people who had no insurance. It was difficult. It is so much worse today. Forty-four million people have no health insurance, and we are not spending time talking about that. It is a serious problem.