Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am here very proudly and gratefully to support the nomination of Jeffrey Meyer as a U.S. district court judge for the District of Connecticut. I am proud because of his extraordinary credentials. I am grateful to President Obama and, hopefully, to this body for giving Connecticut the services of a professor, litigator, prosecutor, and a person of extraordinary integrity and ability. Jeffrey Meyer has all of the qualifications in extraordinary depth and quality to be a great judge. He is truly a lawyers' lawyer. He is a prosecutors' prosecutor. He will be a judges' judge.

Mr. Meyer served as a legal aid lawyer in Vermont for Vermont Legal Aid and as an associate of two Washington, DC, law firms. He really has made his mark as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Connecticut, where he served for 10 years, five of them as appeals chief. He also was a law clerk to Judge Oakes for the Second Circuit. He has a grounding in academia, having taught at Quinnipiac Law School and served as Supreme Court advocacy clinic teacher at Yale, where he has also been a visiting professor since 2000.

I am abbreviating and summarizing his credentials because they are well documented and well known in this body. What can't be summarized so easily is the quality of judgment he has and that befits a judge on the Federal court.

Judges on the U.S. district court, as I know from my own experience, having litigated for quite a few years, are often the last point of justice for many people in our country. They are the voice and face of justice for so many people who may not have the means or the persistence to appeal further, and for most litigants he will be the voice and face of justice before his court. That is a very solemn responsibility. It is a responsibility for life.

These decisions about who will serve on the district court are among the most important we make in this body, so we approach it seriously and thoughtfully. Following the high standards we impose, Jeffrey Meyer aptly and abundantly meets the test for serving as a U.S. district court judge: His background in litigation; his experience in actually trying cases; his background as an academic, in thinking through some of the toughest issues of the law and teaching others how to do it, how to actually be a lawyer; and, of course, his judgment and his sense of perspective and, most importantly, his integrity.

I have worked with Jeff Meyer. I know of his dedication to his clients. I have worked with him in very tough personal situations where his advice to a client would make a critical difference in that person's life. I know he has the human quality of compassion and insight that is really necessary to make judgments about credibility when he has to judge the credibility of a witness on the stand or when he has to sentence an individual who may have broken the law but has mitigating factors to present. Anybody who spends time in a trial court knows that judges have to make split-second decisions based on their knowledge of the law but also on their instincts, on what they sense is right. Jeff Meyer has that quality of judgment that makes all the difference in the world. Some people have it, even if they haven't graduated, as Jeff Meyer did, from some of the best schools in the country, and some people don't, even when they have all the degrees in the world. Maybe it is common sense or horse sense or good instincts or character. It is very hard for anyone to say who has it without meeting them, as we did on the Judiciary Committee, and knowing them.

I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, my great friend and colleague Senator Leahy, for championing people of this great ability. Senator Leahy has devoted his lifetime to the quality of our Federal judiciary, and it has been immensely beneficial to our judiciary and to all who appear before our Federal judges to have a champion such as Senator Leahy of Vermont.

There are now 96 vacancies in our Federal court. Thirty-nine of those vacancies have been classified as judicial emergencies. Let us get on with our task and our responsibility to make sure justice is not delayed in the greatest country in the history of the world, because we know so often justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied. That may be true of the least seemingly important case that matters so greatly to the person whose life is at stake or it may be an issue of great moment to the Nation's future. But one way or the other, the American people rely on us to make sure justice is done, that judges are nominated and confirmed, and that we enable every American to have access to judges who will decide fairly and wisely the merits of their case. Whether it is through a trial or in a motion, justice is what makes our Nation one of the greatest--the greatest, in fact--in the history of the world.

I am very proud and grateful for the opportunity to support Jeff Meyer to be a U.S. district court judge for Connecticut.

I yield the floor.

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