Nomination Of Marth N. Johnson To Be Administrator, General Services Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I wish to take a few minutes to express my frustration and my dismay at the roadblocks which have been placed in the way of Senate nominations for key positions at the Department of Defense. These obstructions take place at a time when these nominees--there are four of them--are critically needed by the Department of Defense. We are a nation at war. Our national security interests require us to end these obstruction tactics and immediately fill these four positions with highly qualified patriots.

Each of these nominees has been favorably reported to the Senate by unanimous vote from the Committee on Armed Services. They responded to extensive advance policy questions. They appeared at a hearing of our committee. Nobody has informed me of any concern about the qualifications of any one of these four nominees. Yet there is an objection here on the floor of the Senate every time these nominations are considered for confirmation. If any Senator has a concern about any of these four Defense Department nominees, I wish they would let me know about those concerns so we can address those concerns. We have heard from nobody. We have unanimous approval by the Armed Services Committee of four Defense nominees. They have been sitting on our calendar since December 2--over 2 months--while these positions go unfilled and we are in the middle of two wars.

One of these nominees is retired Marine Major General Clifford Stanley. He was nominated to be Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. This position is critically important. It is responsible for our military readiness. It is responsible for our total force management. It is responsible for military and civilian personnel requirements that need to be filled. This position is responsible for pay and benefits. Let me repeat this. The pay and benefits of our military personnel is the responsibility of the person who has been nominated for this position, and he has been sitting waiting for confirmation for 2 months. What kind of a message is this to the men and women who put on the uniform of this country? Military and civilian personnel training is the responsibility of this office, military and civilian family matters, exchange, commissary, nonappropriated fund activities, personnel requirements for weapons support, National Guard and Reserve personnel matters, and health care for the military and their families.

General Stanley was the first African-American regimental commander in the Marine Corps. He has served with honor and distinction. He is now retired. We are lucky we can get someone such as General Stanley to come back into public service to fill this position. Yet there has been a hold on his nomination since December 2.

The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have both made personal appeals to me and to other Members, including, I think, the leadership of this body, to confirm General Stanley so he can perform those essential duties which I have outlined. His nomination, again, was unanimously supported by our committee. Our distinguished Presiding Officer is a wonderful member of our committee. No one, again, has brought any problem with this nomination to my attention. No one has said he is not qualified. I think there is unanimous consensus that he is extraordinarily well qualified.

While we have servicemembers, who have volunteered to serve, and their families under great stress, they are fighting for our interests in two wars, we have a critically important person who is awaiting confirmation for a position which affects every one of their lives. It is unconscionable that these roadblocks were placed in the way of these nominees.

Another critical nomination is that of Frank Kendall III, who was nominated to be Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology. The individual confirmed to this position is responsible for assisting the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology and Logistics in supervising Department of Defense acquisition, establishing policies for acquisition, including the procurement of goods and services, research and development, developmental testing, and contract administration.

We have all these problems with contracts, with testing, with development, with cost overruns. We reformed our law now so that we have much better acquisition rules in place to try to see if we can't get rid of some of these cost overruns.

We have a nominee to fill the position of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and our friends on the other side of the aisle--someone over there--have a hold on his nomination for, I know, no reason related to his qualifications. There has been no issue about his qualifications, about any of the four of these nominees. Again, we have a critical position. As I indicated, particularly we have acquisition reform which we just adopted. It is so essential to control the cost of our national defense. Mr. Kendall's nomination, like General Stanley's nomination, has been before this Senate since December 2, over 2 months.

Another nomination is that of Erin Conaton to be the Under Secretary of the Air Force. We all know her. She is on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee. Nobody has raised an issue about her. We are lucky to have her. Yet there is a hold from the other side of the aisle for some unspecified reason, nothing to do with her. But here she is in a position which is so important to the Air Force.

If designated by the Secretary, the Under Secretary of the Air Force serves as the Department of Defense Executive Agent for Space. She also serves as the chief management officer of the Air Force--we have all these problems, and our Presiding Officer knows about the problems of auditing and knows about the management and the business problems we have in our defense units. He knows it from experience in the Senate. He knows from his own personal life experience how important this is. And we cannot get the woman--who probably is as knowledgeable about this subject as anyone, based on all of her years over at the House Armed Services Committee--we cannot get her off the Senate calendar.

Terry Yonkers has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations and Environment. This Assistant Secretary is responsible for overall supervision for all matters relating to Air Force installations, environment, and logistics, including planning, acquisition, sustainment and disposal of Air Force real property and natural resources, environmental program compliance, energy management, safety and occupational health of Air Force personnel.

These are important, vital positions to the well-being of our men and women in uniform. It is unconscionable that one or more people on the other side of the aisle continue to put holds on these nominations. They cannot find any problem with their qualifications because there is none. It is just endless holds, endless filibuster threats, endless roadblocks that stop these and so many other nominations. But these are Defense Department nominations in the middle of two wars, and these roadblocks have to be removed.

I hope we will take up all four of these nominations immediately. We have servicemembers volunteering to risk their lives in defense of the Nation. The least we can do--the least we can do--as a Senate is to confirm nominees for the critical positions to lead the Department of Defense.

Again, finally--and I know my great friend from Illinois is sitting 3 feet away from me and has made the same suggestion, as he has pressed so hard to get these roadblocks removed--if anybody has a problem with these nominees, would they please come to the floor and tell us. They can tell us, hopefully, publicly, but they could tell us privately. We have heard nothing. These nominees--all four of them--were unanimously approved in the Armed Services Committee. So we don't know of any problem. We know their qualifications, and they are extraordinary in every one of their cases.

This filibustering that is going on around here and the threat of filibustering and the constant roadblocks that are thrown up in front of these nominees is unconscionable. It goes beyond anything I have ever seen around here in 32 years. We all know there are people who object to nominees, but, hopefully, usually because they have an objection against something the nominee has done or said. In this case, there is nothing like that. This is some unrelated matter, apparently, which has caused somebody to hold them hostage while they try to extract some concession out of somebody.

It seems to me, as a body, we simply have to find a way where we can get our nominations back on a reasonably decent track. I say that, with greater emphasis, when in the middle of two wars we have four essential nominees.

Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. LEVIN. Yes.

Mr. DURBIN. I would tell the Senator I am not 100 percent pure. I have held up a nomination in the past, but I always state my purpose. The two I can recall immediately were to get agencies to do things they said they would have done long before and, in fact, they did them and I released my hold immediately. It was issuing a report. It wasn't a matter of filling a job or a project or something such as that. So it has been done. But I think if it is done with transparency and in a timely way, we can live with it. In this situation, we are seeing our Executive Calendar stacked with nominations.

There was one in particular, which I spoke about the other morning, that struck me--Dr. Stanley, who is trying to take a position with, if I am not mistaken, manpower and readiness.

Mr. LEVIN. In charge of it; right.

Mr. DURBIN. For the Department of Defense. If I remember correctly, this gentleman has served 33 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, was a major general, and he was the first African-American regimental commander in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. It is clear he is qualified. There is no question about his patriotism and love of this country. The fact he would go through this process--let them go through every aspect of every corner of his life to prepare him for this nomination--and then be held up on the floor by the Senator from Alabama, I would ask the Senator: When he was considered before your committee, did anyone question this man's ability or his service to our Nation?

Mr. LEVIN. Quite the opposite. His references were superb. Not only was there no objection raised, it was quite the opposite. We were delighted he was willing to come out of retirement and serve. This is a real find. These nominees are performing a real public service, in many cases taking a lot less money in pay than they could get in the private sector.

I agree with my good friend from Illinois too. Many of us--I will not say all of us--including myself, have placed holds on nominations. That is not unusual. But usually there is some reason you have that you are willing to disclose and you want to take up with the nominee or you want some report that has not been filed that was promised. You want something that relates to the nominee. The objections here, the roadblocks here have nothing to do with these nominees. There is no objection to these nominees.

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, in my era in politics, one of the most frightening things you could ever hear when you were about to go into an event was when the host of that event called you to the side and said: You will be speaking following Ted Kennedy. That was the worst news you could receive. No one in the world wanted to follow Ted Kennedy. He was that good and well loved and a man who had given his life to public service and to the State of Massachusetts.

Well, our friend, Paul Kirk, who is seeing his tenure in the Senate come to an end either today or this week had the unfortunate responsibility to follow that great man. But if there was ever a person who could stand and take the job, it was Paul Kirk. He came to the Senate not just as a former staffer of Senator Ted Kennedy after Senator Kennedy passed away but as truly a very close friend of Senator Kennedy.

On the day he was sworn in, Senator Paul Kirk of Massachusetts said he assumed his duties feeling ``the profound absence of a friend'' but a ``full understanding of his devotion and understanding of public service.''

Paul Kirk promised to be a voice and a vote for the causes which Senator Kennedy believed in, and for 4 months and 10 days he has honored that promise to his old friend and to the people of Massachusetts.

I will tell you that Paul Kirk, in his short time here, has served with dignity and integrity. We thank him and his wife Gail, who made a personal sacrifice to let her husband come and take up this responsibility for this important chapter in his life and this important chapter in the history of the Senate.

I think it is fair to say Paul Kirk never dreamed he would be a Senator. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. He worked as an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. He came to Washington in 1968 and worked on Senator Robert Kennedy's Presidential campaign. He considered quitting politics, as many people did, after Robert Kennedy's political assassination. But Ted Kennedy convinced him to pick up the fallen standard and carry on Bobby's work.

For the next 8 years, Paul Kirk worked in this Senate as one of Ted Kennedy's closest aides. He was with Senator Kennedy in 1980, when the last of the Kennedy brothers ran for President. I remember that so well as the downstate coordinator of the Ted Kennedy for President campaign in Illinois.

In 1985, Paul Kirk took on the challenge of chairing the Democratic National Committee in the middle of the Reagan era--quite a political challenge for any Democrat. He served as cochairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, and he has been chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation since 1992.

Paul Kirk is a good fellow, with a great sense of humor. I can tell you what has been said about him. He has never been known for excitement. One friend said of Paul Kirk several years ago: Behind that quiet exterior is a quiet interior. He is that sort of person--soft spoken but effective. He may not speak in a lion's roar, as Ted Kennedy did, but his reverence for America and his belief in this great Nation and his sense of justice is just as strong. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, during the historic effort to break the filibuster on health care reform, Senator Paul Kirk came to the floor and told the story of a young woman from Somerville, MA, who had finished college, prepared for graduate school, and who suffered organ failure. In many States, that woman might have quickly found herself in a critical state and in medical debt and surely she wouldn't have been able to find insurance.

But because of Massachusetts's first in the Nation, near universal health care program, Paul Kirk told us that young woman could still obtain affordable health care, even though she now has what is characterized as a preexisting condition that will require her to be on medication for the rest of her life.

Senator Kennedy was proud of what Massachusetts, his home State, had achieved in health care. Ensuring that Americans in every State had decent, affordable health care, Paul Kirk said, was the ``cause of his life.'' It has been Senator Kirk's consuming goal in the Senate, and I hope it will soon become a reality. We are too close to a solution on health care--and the need is too great--for us to stop now.

In 1968, when Ted Kennedy became majority whip--the position I now hold in the Senate--then-majority leader Mike Mansfield welcomed him to the leadership by saying: ``Of all the Kennedys, the Senator is the only one who was and is a real Senate man.'' Part of what made Ted Kennedy a real Senate man was his personality and his inexhaustible patience and optimism. Part of it was his knowledge of how the Senate works and part was his great staff.

The Kennedy staff has always been known as the A-Team in the Senate. They are smart, they are talented, they are dedicated, and after they leave Ted Kennedy, they go places unimaginable for most staffers because they are so highly regarded. Some have been with Senator Kennedy for decades and continue with Senator Kirk, including the legendary Carey Parker, the Senator's chief speech writer; Michael Myers, whom I know well from his activities on the floor, the Senator's staff director on the HELP Committee, who worked so hard on health care reform. He has been amazing.

I wish to thank all the staffers for Senator Kirk, and previously for Senator Kennedy, for carrying on that standard of justice and fairness. I thank them as a group for their service to Massachusetts and to America. It is because of them, and countless others whom Senator Kennedy touched, myself included, we have been enlisted in the Kennedy causes and the Kirk causes with a great deal of pride.

A special thank-you to the Kennedy family--especially Vicki, Kara, Ted, and Patrick, Caroline and Curran--for sharing so much of the man they loved with the Nation he loved.

Finally, I wish to welcome to the Senate--and in a short time he will come to be sworn in--Senator Scott Brown. As Senator Kennedy would have said, if he were here: failte. He was always eager to reach across the aisle and find solutions to the problems we face. I look forward to an opportunity to do the same with Senator Brown in the Senate.

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