Floor Statements

Madam President, I rise to pay tribute to Joe Frank Neikirk and the business success he has helped build. Mr. Neikirk is the president and general manager of Paul's Discount in Somerset, KY. Paul's Discount has become a local institution in the region, and this month celebrated its 50th anniversary of operations.

The land that Paul's Discount now sits upon was purchased by Joe's ancestor, Franklin Neikirk, and his spouse for 500 cords of wood in 1856. Joe's parents, Paul E. and Frances R. Neikirk, opened the first discount store in south-central Kentucky on that land 104 years later in the early spring of 1960.

Founder Paul Neikirk passed away in 1974. Today Joe runs the store with his wife Jamie. The original store occupied only about 1,800 square feet and had three employees. Today, Paul's Discount boasts more than 20,000 square feet of selling space, plus three warehouses.

They offer sporting goods, hardware, automotive goods, clothing and crafts. Joe's glad he's still in the same original location, saying, ``You can't duplicate the atmosphere of this building.'' Judging by the crowd that turned out for the 50th anniversary, he must certainly be right.

The Commonwealth Journal recently published an excellent article about Paul's Discount, the Neikirk family's legacy and the 50th anniversary celebration that I would like to share with my colleagues. I ask unanimous consent that the full article be printed in the Record.

Madam President, last night Senate Democrats introduced their latest version of the deficit extenders bill.

It has one thing in common with every other version they have offered: it adds new taxes and over $30 billion to an already staggering $13 trillion national debt despite consistent bipartisan rejection of that idea.

Both sides have offered ways to address the programs in this bill that both sides agree should be extended. And now we even agree on redirecting untimely and untargeted money from the failed stimulus bill. The only difference is that the Republican proposal reduces the deficit while the Democrat proposal adds to it.

So the only thing Democrats are insisting on in this debate is that we add to the debt.

The principle they are defending here is not some program. The principle Democrats are defending is that they will not pass a bill unless it adds to the debt.

Madam President, as I stand here this morning, House Democrats are desperately trying to round up the votes they need to pass Congress's latest effort to do what the first amendment specifically says it cannot, namely, to make a law abridging the freedom of speech.

The first thing to say about the so-called DISCLOSE Act is that it was authored behind closed doors without even a flicker of sunlight. In other words, a bill that is purportedly about bringing transparency to the electoral system was written without any. Just yesterday, a 45-page amendment was proposed to the bill without any public oversight.

The second thing to say about this bill is that it was written by the House Democrats' campaign committee chairman, who has been out trumpeting it as a ``response'' to the Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United.

As I noted yesterday, Democrats have done this before with free speech rulings they have found to be politically inconvenient. In the mid-1990s, they did not like Justice Breyer's decision in Colorado Republicans, so the Clinton administration and Elena Kagan set about finding ways to benefit Democrats at the expense of Republicans. So past is prologue.

This bill is not about preserving any principle of transparency. It is about protecting incumbent Democrat politicians. As for the substance, a brief review of the bill itself shows that the DISCLOSE Act is about as ill-named as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and ensures as much freedom as the poorly named Employee Free Choice Act. But, of course, House Democrats have said they do not care what they pass. They just want to pass something. Now that is quite the way to legislate.

Supporters of the bill say it is needed to deal with special interests. But the loopholes Democrats wrote into it show that they view some interests as more special than others. Take for example the spate of new speech prohibitions that did not exist prior to the Citizens United decision.

That is right, this bill goes far beyond what the court held to muzzle the speech of some while granting a pass for others.

Expansive new restrictions on government contractors and TARP recipients, but not their unions or government unions.

Expansive new speech restrictions on domestic subsidiaries which employ Americans who pay American taxes, without restricting unions at these same companies or international unions.

And that is just in the first few pages. Over the next few weeks I will highlight more of these ``winners and losers'' provisions Democrats are advocating in this bill.

If there were any doubt that this one-sided bill is not about principle but about changing the rules to the political game, just look at the special treatment House Democrats have been shopping around for weeks in an effort to sell this bill. They have engaged in a game of special interest carve outs which is the legislative equivalent of a game of Twister.

For example, in drafting a bill that House Democrats say is designed to deal with special interests, they have deliberately exempted what they have long called one of the biggest special interests of all: the National Rifle Association.

So in writing a bill that is supposedly about diminishing the influence of special interests, Democrat leaders cut a deal to allow a chosen few to operate unfettered by its restrictions, thereby enhancing the power of those chosen few. Apparently they did not learn their lesson from the reaction they got to the Cornhusker Kickback or the Louisiana Purchase.

What is transpiring in the House right now with this bill turns the first amendment on its head. Incumbent politicians are intentionally protecting some large groups so they can muster the votes to restrict many more citizens groups that have less political clout but whose participation in the political process the incumbent politicians find inconvenient.

Let me be clear. I support the second amendment, and I support the NRA's vigorous exercise of its first amendment rights in order to defend the second amendment rights of its members. But this is not about the Democrats' affinity for the second amendment. If it were, they would have carved out an exception for the Gun Owners of America as well. As it is, the GOA vehemently opposes this bill. Why? Because they know it restricts first amendment rights.

This bill is opposed by over 350 groups ranging from the Sierra Club and the ACLU, to the Chamber, the NFIB, and National Right to Life.

That is right, Democrats have done a unique thing here: they have united the left and the right in opposition to the effort to take away political speech from some and enhance it for others. These organizations, standing on firm first amendment principles, have been vigorously opposing this effort to stifle their speech.

And I stand with them in asking each and every one of my colleagues to join me in honoring the oath we took to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, and, in particular, the first amendment to free speech.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Yes.

Mr. President, I rise to briefly comment on the Iran sanctions conference report, which we will be voting on shortly.

I am pleased with the bill before the Senate, as I have been urging enactment of this legislation for some time. I brought it up with the President on numerous occasions over the last 6 to 8 months. I cosponsored it in the last Congress and in the current one.

Congress has been slow to act as the Iranian program to enrich uranium has progressed.

Iran has also taken advantage of the delay to blunt the impact of this measure.

Just today a headline in the Washington Post read that ``Iran is prepared for fuel sanctions.''

But this legislation should be viewed as only a part of a broader, comprehensive effort by the U.S. to harness the various means of national power to ensure that Iran does not secure a nuclear weapon.

As President Obama has stated, Iran's ``development of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable''.

We must work with our allies in the gulf to make clear to Iran that the cost of developing a weapon exceed the prestige they think they would gain from acquiring this capability.

First and foremost, the sanctions in this legislation need to be implemented and implemented quickly, not waived.

The time for further delay is past.

The collective strength of the recent U.N. Security Council resolution and this conference report must be combined to strike at Iranian shadow companies and the regime's leaders.

The need for urgency should be obvious because the threat posed to the U.S. and its allies by the revolutionary Iranian regime is grave. Its president has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. An Iranian nuclear weapon threatens to set off an arms race in the Middle East, and embolden the regime in its support of terrorist groups.

Passage of Iranian sanctions is an important first step, but only a first step.

I agree with the President that the U.S. and our allies must make clear to Iran that the development of a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.

That is why I urge passage of this conference report and all other necessary measures to deter the Iranian regime.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I indicated to my friends on the other side of the aisle I would be propounding a consent agreement. Let me make a few brief observations and then I will do precisely that.

The majority wants to make this debate about Republicans opposing something. Let me be perfectly clear: The only things Republicans have opposed in this debate are job-killing taxes and adding to the national debt. We have offered ways of paying for these programs and we have been eager to approve them.

What we are not willing to do is to use worthwhile programs as an excuse to burden our children and our grandchildren with an even bigger national debt than we already have. So the biggest reason the cloture vote we just had failed is because Democrats simply refused to pass a bill that does not add to the debt. That is the principle we are fighting for in this debate, and let me suggest that I can prove it. In a moment I will offer a 1-month extension of the expired unemployment insurance benefits, COBRA subsidy, flood insurance program, small business lending program, and the 2009 poverty guidelines. This extension would be fully paid for using the very same stimulus funds that our friends on the other side just voted--almost unanimously--to redirect for these purposes. Let me repeat that. We would pay for the extension with a Democratically approved stimulus offset.

If the Democrats object to extending these programs using their own stimulus offset to pay for them, then they will be saying loudly and clearly that their commitment to deficit spending trumps their desire to help the unemployed.

Let's be clear about the principle that is at stake here. Are our friends on the other side willing to extend these programs without adding to the debt? That is the real question in this debate.

So, in that regard, I ask consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 4853; that all after the enacting clause be stricken and the McConnell amendment at the desk be agreed to; that the bill as amended be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Madam President, I would only briefly offer that the offset I offered was one that the majority just voted for. Obviously they did not find it offensive in the context of the measure that was defeated.

We will continue to work on this in the hopes that we can pass this worthwhile measure without adding to the national debt.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, on Monday, the Senate will begin the confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. And I think it is safe to say most American do not know all that much about her.

But a fuller picture of this nominee is beginning to emerge.

The recent release of documents relating to Ms. Kagan's work in the Clinton White House reveals a woman who was committed to advancing a political agenda, a woman who was less concerned about objectively analyzing the law than the ways in which the law could be used to advance a political goal.

In other words, these memos and notes reveal a woman whose approach to the law was as a political advocate, the very opposite of what the American people expect in a judge.

This is the kind of thinking behind the current Democratic effort to pass the so-called DISCLOSE Act, a bill designed to respond to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United that they think puts them at a political disadvantage in the fall. That is why the bill was written by the chairman of their campaign committee.

And this is also the kind of thinking that seems to have motivated the Clinton White House to seek a similar legislative response the last time the Supreme Court issued a decision in this area that Democrats thought put them at a political disadvantage.

I am referring here to the case of Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC, a case in which the Supreme Court essentially said that the Federal Government could not limit political parties from spending money on campaign ads called ``independent expenditures'' that said things like, ``Vote against Smith,'' or ``Vote for Jones.''

This was not an especially controversial decision, as evidenced by the fact that it was written by Justice Breyer, one of the Court's most prominent liberals. But the decision put Democrats at a political disadvantage. So the Clinton administration did the same thing then that the Obama administration is trying to do today. They considered proposals to lessen its impact and to benefit Democrats over Republicans. And Elena Kagan worked to advance that goal as part of President Clinton's campaign finance task force.

Ms. Kagan's notes reveal that finding ways to help Democrats over Republicans was very much on her mind. According to one of her notes, she wrote:

``Free TV as balance to independent expenditures? Clearly,

on mind of Dems--need a way to balance this.''

The ``balance'' Ms. Kagan is referring to was a way for Democrats to balance what they viewed as the Republicans' advantage in helping their candidates with independent expenditures. And ``free TV,'' well, that is a reference to Democrats wanting free television to help them out in their campaigns. Providing free TV would be a ``significant benefit,'' Ms. Kagan wrote. It was also something the Clinton administration could bring about, she suggested, by simply having the FCC issue a new regulation, or by adding such a provision to legislation the White House was helping to craft.

But this was not the only way in which Ms. Kagan thought about stacking the deck to help Democrats over Republicans at the time. Another note reveals her approach to the issue of soft money, the money political parties used to spend outside of Federal elections. Ms. Kagan's notes show that she thought banning it would hurt Republicans and help Democrats. She even seemed to delight in the prospect of finding ways to disadvantage Republicans. Here is what she wrote in her notes:

``Soft [money] ban--affects Repubs, not Dems!''

And if I had this quote up on a chart, you would see that she punctuated this sentence with an exclamation point.

So let me repeat that quote one more time:

``Soft [money] ban--affects Repubs, not Dems''--punctuated with an exclamation point.

We already knew that Ms. Kagan and her office argued to the Supreme Court at different points in the Citizens United case that the Federal Government had the power to ban political speech in videos, books and pamphlets if it did not like the speaker.

Then we learned she went out of her way to prevent lawyers at the Justice Department from officially noting their serious legal concerns with campaign finance legislation in order to help the Clinton administration achieve its political goals.

Now we learn that she thought about drafting such legislation in ways to help Democrats and hurt Republicans. And her advocacy and apparent glee at identifying some political harm to Republicans is, to my mind, another piece of her record that calls into question her ability to impartially apply the law to all who would come before her as a Justice on our Nation's highest Court.

The more we learn about Ms. Kagan's work as a political adviser and political operative, the more questions arise about her ability to make the necessary transition from politics to neutral arbiter. As Ms. Kagan herself once noted, during her years in the Clinton

administration, she spent ``most'' of her time not serving ``as an attorney'' but as a policy adviser. And her notes and memoranda reveal that all too often her policy advice and actions were based, first and foremost, on what was good for Democrats.

This kind of thinking might be okay for a political adviser. But there is a place for politics and for advocating for one's party, and that place is not on the Supreme Court. A political adviser may be expected to seek political advantage, but judges have a different task.

We do not know how Elena Kagan will apply the law because she has no judicial record, little experience as a private practitioner, and no significant writings for the last several years. So the question before the Senate is whether, given Ms. Kagan's background as a political adviser and academic, we believe she could impartially apply the law to groups with which she does not agree and for which she and the Obama administration might not empathize. So far, I do not have that confidence.

As the hearings progress, we will know better whether Ms. Kagan could ``administer justice without respect to persons,'' as the judicial oath requires.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I would say to my good friend, the majority leader, as he knows, this is an agreement we have been prepared to make since last month. I am glad we were able to finally work our way through it and get a significant number of these nominations confirmed.

Madam President, it is now official. Top Democrats on Capitol Hill are starting to signal their intention to raise taxes on the middle class. The House majority leader in a speech today warned that in order to do anything about the debt crisis Republicans have been speaking about on the Senate floor in recent weeks, President Obama will have no choice, no choice, but to break his campaign pledge of ``no new taxes'' for millions of American families.

That is the majority leader in the House of Representatives in a speech today, saying that the President will have no choice but to break his promise of no new taxes for millions of American families.

Respectfully, I think this is a tough argument for the Democratic leadership in the House that will not even take up the Senate's version of the so-called doc fix legislation for no apparent reason other than the fact that it does not increase the debt.

It is hard to imagine anyone taking advice on fiscal discipline from a party that has spent the last 2\1/2\ weeks arguing not about how to pay for the extenders bill that is on the floor or how to use this bill to cut the debt but about how much money to add to the debt in the process of passing it.

Here is another idea Democrats should consider, one that Americans have been proposing loudly and clearly: Stop spending money you do not have. Stop spending money you do not have. The American people do not think our problem is that the government taxes too little. Our problem is that the government taxes too much and that it spends too much and borrows too much. Until Democrats demonstrate even the slightest ability to restrain the recklessness with which they spend America's hard-earned tax dollars, the job creators and the workers of this country are not about to take them seriously on how to lower the national debt.

The American people should not be asked to pay the price for Democrats' recklessness through higher taxes. America faces a debt crisis. Democrats have done nothing whatsoever to show they understand that. Breaking a campaign pledge now will not help; cutting spending will.

I yield the floor.

I have one consent in here, yes.

Mr. President, it should be perfectly clear by now that Democrats here in Washington have no intention of being encumbered by the will of the American people. Whether it is health care, financial reform, creating private sector jobs, spending, debt, or even the oilspill, Americans say they want one thing and Democrats do another.

And we are seeing the same thing in the ongoing debate over the deficit extenders bill that is on the floor. Americans are anxious in a way they have never been about our monstrous national debt. Yet for nearly 3 weeks now, Democrats in Congress have been arguing among themselves not about how much they should cut the debt down but about how much they should increase it.

So we can add this to the list of crises Americans are begging Congress to address but which Democrats are either ignoring or exploiting to advance their agenda. The White House likes to talk about inflection points. Well, for most Americans, a $13 trillion debt should have marked an inflection point for Democrats on the issue of debt. But the debate over this extenders bill has shown Democrats to be oblivious to the gravity of this crisis.

At a moment when certain European countries appear to be coming apart because of their own debt, Democrats in Washington still can't break the habit. Economists are warning us every day to get the debt under control. Just today, in fact, it was reported that Germany's Economy Minister is pleading with the Obama administration to cut spending and to restore fiscal balance or risk instability.

Yet nearly 3 weeks into the debate over the extenders bill, Democrats still can't agree to pass it without borrowing more money to pay for it. Republicans offered a fully offset 30-day extension of this bill that didn't just cover its cost but actually reduced the deficit in the process. Democrats rejected it. We offered an amendment that would have provided a long term extension of the expired provisions and lowered the deficit by $55 billion over 10 years. Democrats rejected that too.

This should be an easy one, but Democrats are making it difficult because they just can't seem to bring themselves to pay for legislation.

But the American people aren't conflicted on this issue. And they want us to show we are serious, that we are willing to make the same kinds of tough choices they themselves have been forced to make in this recession. So I say to my friend from Nevada I am going to ask, now, a unanimous consent.

I again ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 411, S. 3421; further, that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table. Before the chair rules, for clarity, this is a paid-for 30- day extension of the extenders bill.

Mr. President, our good friends on the other side still do not seem to get it. They are twisting and turning, not in an effort to cut the debt but to borrow as much as they can with the minimum votes they need to pass this bill. And the best part of all is their justification. You guessed it. They want to blame President Bush for their own unwillingness to pay for this bill. They say that because the debt grew during his administration they are immune to any criticism for dramatically increasing it themselves.

Well, I have some news for our friends on the other side: Nobody is buying that anymore, because there is not any comparison here. When President Obama took office, the deficits he inherited were projected to $4.3 trillion over the next 10 years. One year later, one year after President Bush left office, the Congressional Budget Office had to put out a revised estimate: After 1 year of Democrats controlling Washington, estimated deficits just over the next decade had nearly doubled to $8.1 trillion, in the middle of a recession; in other words, at a time when projected revenues coming in are actually decreasing.

Or consider this: The largest annual deficit ever accumulated by the previous administration was $455 billion.

The largest annual deficit ever accumulated by the previous administration was $455 billion. So what did President Obama do when he took office? He wrote a budget that guarantees average annual deficits of more than double that every year for the next 10 years. More than doubles the largest deficit we had during the Bush years and anticipates that for every year for the next decade.

So the kind of spending and debt Democrats are engaged in and which they are committed to continue year after year is like nothing this country has ever seen. We have never seen anything like this. It threatens not only the livelihoods of our children, it threatens our national security and the very safety net Democrats claim they want to protect.

The fact is, the longer we wait to address this debt in a serious manner, the more that safety net actually frays and the harder this crisis will be to address. At some point a choice has to be made, and that point is now.

I noticed that the President's Chief of Staff had some ideas over the weekend about how to frame up the November elections. I cannot think of a better example of how detached the Democrats seem to be at this moment from the concerns of the American people. Americans want to know what is being done to fix a broken pipe at the bottom of the Gulf, not what is being done to fix the election. The White House might view the upcoming election as its biggest crisis at the moment, but the American people are focused on fixing this pipe and cleaning up this mess. Two months of delays and bureaucratic redtape have done nothing to solve the crisis, but they have done a lot to discredit the kind of big- government solutions that Democrats continue to promote. Every day the oil continues to flow is a day Americans' faith in government ends.

I yield the floor.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett), the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg), the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Kyl), the Senator from South Dakota (Mr. Thune), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Madam President, the majority leader and I have been discussing, over the last few days, clearing a number of nominees, and I am prepared--although I will defer tonight--to attempt to clear a list of over 60 nominees. The President made some reference to that over the weekend. I just want to make sure everybody understands both downtown and here that we are prepared to clear over 60 nominations and have been prepared to clear them for the last week, and I am hopeful my friend, the majority leader, will be able to indicate at some point in the near future that we might be able to go forward with these nominees.

Madam President, I thank the majority leader.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, last month, the President nominated his friend and member of his administration, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. Ms. Kagan has never been a judge and only practiced law for 2 years as a junior associate before her current position as Solicitor General. She has largely been an academic, administrator, and policy advocate and advisor.

So we have not had a lot of information about her background.

But recent documents from her time as a policy advocate in the Clinton administration have shed more light on her views. And, in my view, they help answer the question some have asked as to whether she would be able to transition into a very different kind of role; namely, that of an impartial jurist Americans expect to sit above the political fray.

As a judge on our highest court, Ms. Kagan would no longer be a member of President Obama's team. Rather, her job would be to apply the law even-handedly to persons and groups with whom she might not necessarily empathize. And in that regard, it is instructive to see how she's viewed the law and applied it when it comes to persons and groups with which she may not agree.

I previously discussed Ms. Kagan's role in the Citizens United case. Here was a case in which the government said it could block a small nonprofit corporation from showing a movie that it made about then- Senator Hillary Clinton because it viewed the film as the kind of political speech that was prohibited by Federal campaign finance laws.

This was not only the first case Ms. Kagan argued as a member of the Obama administration; it appears to have been the first case she has ever argued in any court. And in it, she and her office took the position, at different points in the case, that the Federal Government had the power to ban videos, books and pamphlets if it didn't like the speech or the speaker, a shocking position for the solicitor general of a nation that has always prided itself on a robust exchange of ideas under the first amendment.

The justices on the Supreme Court, conservative and liberal alike, also seem to have been taken aback by this position. As were legal commentators of all political stripes; but now, in looking at some of the documents from her time as a political advisor in the Clinton administration, perhaps her views before the Supreme Court in Citizens United are not that surprising after all.

As a part of President Clinton's team, Ms. Kagan co-wrote a memo in which she said it was unfortunate that the Constitution stands in the way of many government restrictions on spending on political speech. She also wrote that many of the Supreme Court's precedents that protect political speech in this area were, to quote her memo, ``mistaken in many cases.''

We have also learned from the documents produced by the Clinton Library last week that Ms. Kagan was a member of the campaign finance working group at the Clinton White House. These documents appear to show that in this area, at least, Ms. Kagan placed her political desires over an evenhanded reading of the law and of the rights that the Constitution protects.

What is more, these newly released documents show that Ms. Kagan went out of her way to prevent the professional lawyers at the Justice Department from officially noting their concerns that the legislation being considered in Congress could infringe on Americans' first amendment rights.

In the mid-1990s, for example, the Office of Legal Counsel was concerned with the constitutionality of campaign finance legislation making its way through Congress. As a July 17, 1996, memo by Ms. Kagan put it: The OLC believed that all of the campaign finance bills under consideration by the House at that time ``present[ed] serious constitutional issues.''

Now, Ms. Kagan did not say these lawyers were wrong. In fact, she noted that their concerns were to be expected in a case like this. But allowing them to express their legal analysis would have been at odds with the Clinton administration's political strategy, a strategy she helped develop.

She was determined, as one memo put it, to ``try to head off DOJ . . . letters'' that noted constitutional problems. So she called a political appointee at the Justice Department and told him that Clinton's Office of Management and Budget ``might well disapprove'' any such opinion letter from the Justice Department.

The phone call evidently worked. The documents we have now seen show that the political appointee with whom she spoke called back and told her the ``OLC did not have adequate time to prepare comments on the campaign finance legislation and, given the possibility that such comments might not go through, would not attempt to do so.'' What a coincidence.

Whether one works in the judicial, legislative, or executive branches of government, you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. In this case, Ms. Kagan recognized that the professional lawyers at the Justice Department had valid legal concerns that these bills might violate Americans' free speech rights. But she disregarded these valid concerns, and even helped prevent them from being aired, in order to help advance a political agenda.

Now, I understand that Ms. Kagan was part of President Clinton's team, just like she is now part of President Obama's team. Both Presidents were no doubt pleased with her political and policy advice. And we know President Obama is very pleased with the job she did in Citizens United. But if she were confirmed to the Supreme Court, she can not be on anyone's team.

Ms. Kagan has said that judging is a ``craft,'' and that the Senate should always insist that a nominee's background show that they can ``master'' that craft. I agree with Ms. Kagan that judging is a craft. But for most of her adult life, she has practiced a much different craft, the craft of political advocacy. We must be convinced that someone who has spent the better part of her career as a political adviser, policy advocate, and academic, rather than as a legal practitioner or a judge, can put aside her personal and political beliefs, and impartially apply the law, rather than be a rubberstamp for the Obama or any other administration. The Clinton library documents make it harder, not easier, to believe that Ms. Kagan could make that necessary transition.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.