Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Madam President, last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I chair, held its hearing on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve…
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Madam President, last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I chair, held its hearing on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve as Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was an opportunity to learn a lot about her: her qualifications, her experience, her approach to cases, her judicial temperament, and her temperament before the committee.
She proved to the public what many of us suspected and some knew: She is, without a doubt, ready to serve on the Supreme Court.
I have spoken before about Judge Jackson's background and qualifications, but some of it bears repeating because this is the critical week before we consider her nomination next week on the floor of the Senate.
She is the daughter of two school teachers, public school teachers. Judge Jackson discovered her passion for the law at the age of 4. See, her dad decided to give up teaching. He had another profession in mind; he was going to become a lawyer. And so he would sit at the kitchen table with his law books all stacked up, and Judge Jackson, at the age of 4, would gather her coloring books and sit next to her daddy. She was going to study too.
She believes that might have been the first time that she thought seriously about becoming a lawyer.
After graduating from public high school in Miami--she had distinguished herself as president of the student body and as the lead on the high school speech and debate team. She competed nationally successfully and visited the campus of Harvard University. She loved it. She decided that she was going to apply to go to school there.
When she went back to her high school in Florida, she sat down with her counselor to talk about that option. The counselor discouraged her; she was aiming too high. But she did it anyway, and she was accepted and then went on to Harvard Law School.
She has clerked at every level of the Federal judiciary. If you are not a lawyer, that may not mean much; but if you are a lawyer, it is a big deal. To think that she started off at the lowest Federal district court level clerking for a judge, then was accepted to move up a level to the circuit judge position to serve as a clerk as well, and then to finally grab the gold ring of being a Supreme Court clerk to none other than Justice Stephen Breyer whose vacancy she is hoping to fill.
She worked in private practice as a lawyer, and she proved that she was a consensus builder all the way along. On the bench, she served as a district court judge and now circuit court in the DC Circuit.
It is no surprise that she has won the admiration and friendship of so many people throughout her career. In fact, she has come before the same Senate Judiciary Committee on three separate occasions with her background carefully reviewed and emerged with the approval of the committee with bipartisan support.
In fact, when you look at it, if you watched last week's hearing before the Judiciary Committee, no one questioned her qualifications, her knowledge, her experience. She really has a platinum resume when it comes to that.
On the final day of the hearing, the committee heard from Anne Williams. Anne Williams is well-known to the Presiding Officer as well as to myself. She served as a district court judge in the Northern District of Illinois and then as a circuit judge on the Seventh Circuit. I believe she was the first African-American woman to do so.
She is retired at this point, but she has volunteered with the American Bar Association to do the careful review of Judge Jackson to make certain that we know every comment that has been made by professionals who have been familiar with her work experience.
Judge Williams is an anomaly politically. Those who are looking for evidence as to whether she is Democrat or Republican, she was initially appointed to the district court by President Reagan and then to the circuit court by President Clinton--a bipartisan nominee all the way.
She came to report to the committee that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had been reviewed with careful personal interviews of 250 separate individuals in her legal career, had emerged unanimously well-qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.
Judge Williams said that in interviewing these lawyers and judges, they asked the hard questions--the ones that you can ask in confidence and in private--and the answers were all the same.
Judge Jackson has a career that has distinguished her as outstanding, excellent, superior, superb, the list of accolades went on and on. The ABA found that Judge Jackson has a sterling reputation for thoughtfulness and collegiality and exceptional competence.
I also asked Judge Williams, serving as the spokesperson for the ABA, to comment on the allegations that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is somehow soft on crime. It is a common mantra coming from the other side of the aisle. And I said, in the course of asking 250 different judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and all the people who worked with and around her, Was there any evidence that she was soft on crime? No. None. None. That is amazing when you think that is the No. 1 talking point against her from the Republican side of the aisle. ``None whatsoever'' is exactly what Judge Williams said. Another ABA witness, Jean Veta, said that the ABA ``heard consistently from not only defense counsel, but [from] prosecutors'' of how unbiased Judge Jackson was throughout her career.
And just as impressive as her qualifications was her performance and candor before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If you ask her a question about stare decisis, she will start responding by defining it in plain English, just to make sure everybody at home, lawyer or nonlawyer, can follow along. She expresses her thinking with surgeon-like precision, which I am sure her husband, Dr. Patrick Johnson, who is an actual surgeon at Georgetown University Hospital, deeply admires. Clarity and impartiality, that is Judge Jackson.
During the hearing, several of my colleagues asked her to describe her judicial philosophy. Pick a label: Are you an originalist; are you a textualist; are you a liberal; are you a conservative? Previous Supreme Court nominees like Chief Justice Roberts have said that they do not have an ``overarching judicial philosophy'' that they bring to a case.
That was a good enough answer for many Republicans if it was given by Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett, but they have complained now that she just won't come up and admit to a label.
She did us one better. She gave a thorough, step-by-step explanation of how she decided a case--every case--and she has some 580 separate written opinions. You don't need an electron microscope to find this judge's judicial philosophy. She has written it down and published it over and over and over again.
She established her independence, she says, by ``clearing [her] mind of any preconceived notions'' when she gets a case, sets aside her personal views, evaluates the facts, listens to the arguments, and then she interprets and applies the law, keeping in mind the limits of judicial authority.
What I have just described is what she told the committee, and it is exactly what we look for and should look for in every judge. I can't recall ever hearing a nominee give such a clear and thorough explanation of their approach to deciding a case. And Judge Jackson's evenhanded record on so many different issues--criminal law, labor relations, executive power--shows that it works.
Finally, the Judiciary Committee hearing allowed the public to observe Judge Jackson's incredible judicial temperament. We spend a lot of time as Senators with the authority under the Constitution to advise and consent, interviewing nominees for courts, trying to determine just what kind of a judge they will be. What will their temperament be? Will they be all swollen and big-headed over this black robe and lifetime appointment, or will they remember the real-life experiences that many people in their courtroom have lived through?
Well, I can tell you, Judge Jackson's temperament has shown through. Frankly, she was tested time and time again. You see, I might just go out on a limb and tell you: There are some Senators that don't show a very good temperament themselves under these circumstances. And they tested her over and over and over again with baseless, wild charges, some of which were just offensive on their face.
I listened to those, and I would look up and think, if she stands up at this point and says, ``That's enough. I am taking my family, and I'm going home,'' nobody would have faulted her for it--some of the questioning was just that bad--but she didn't.
My Republican colleagues promised a fair and respectful hearing. The majority of them, starting with Senator Grassley, did just that; and I commended them for it today in the committee. They set an example of a minority party with a Supreme Court nominee and how the questioning should come down. Unfortunately, others, however, on that side of the table did not.
But in the face of the constant badgering and interruptions, offensive insinuations by a select few Republicans, Judge Jackson never lost her composure--never. She was patient, calm, and dignified.
Many times, the questions were so mean-spirited. And I thought, there sits her husband and her daughter listening to these charges on how she is soft on crime and doesn't care about the plight of children. And when you think about that, what they must think of to hear those things said about the doctor's wife and the kid's mother. It is just hard to take.
She was patient and kind. She didn't lose her temper at one time. Some of my colleagues attended the committee's hearing intent on tearing her down. It didn't work. Instead, she showed America that she can rise to any challenge as a Justice on the Supreme Court.
And despite some of my colleagues' behavior in the committee hearings, last week was an inspiration for so many people across this country. I invited law students from Howard University and my alma mater Georgetown Law to come over and sit through the hearing. We invited interns from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. They wanted to be there at this history-making moment.
They watched her prove that through hard work, a commitment to the law, and in the words of Senator Booker, her grit and grace, she has earned a seat on the highest Court in the land.
I strongly urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a look at this woman and what she will bring to the Court.
It is time, America, after all these years, never having had an African-American woman serve on the Court. It has got to be a challenge to find somebody who is ready to take on the job and take on the challenge. She can meet that challenge and will successfully. She is the best and deserves our support.
Remembering Madeleine Albright
On another topic, Madam President, last week, America and the world lost another trailblazing woman and defender of justice and democracy-- and a friend.
Madeleine Korbel Albright came to the United States at age 11 as a refugee. Her family had been driven out of their native Czechoslovakia twice by murderous regimes, in 1938 by the Nazis and 10 years later by the communists.
Those searing childhood upheavals helped to produce in this young woman a lifelong vigilance against dictators and a fierce commitment to democracy.
Her father had been a diplomat who received political asylum in America. Like nearly all immigrants and refugees who come to this country fleeing the tyranny of autocracy, he was keenly aware that this was a land of freedom. He told his daughter many times, ``Americans don't know how fragile their democracy is--and how resilient it is.''
She also knew persistent autocracy. It can rise at any age in any nation. We see it today in the leadership of Russia. That is why we must protect the rule of law, the most potent defense against dictators.
In 1997, she made history. She became America's first woman Secretary of State under President Clinton, previously serving as our Nation's Ambassador to the United Nations. She was a hardline critic of tyrants and despots who advocated the policy of assertive multilateralism, and she called the United States ``the indispensable nation.''
She believed that the best hope for a free and peaceful world lay in America, exercising leadership and working with the family of Democratic nations to protect democracy, just as we are today in Ukraine.
She was deeply committed to NATO. As Secretary of State, she supported NATO expansion to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic--three nations that lived under the boot heel of Soviet oppression. Today, all three nations are providing a haven for Ukrainian civilians, mostly women and children, who are fleeing Putin's unprovoked and barbaric war on that young democracy.
Madeleine Albright understood that any democracy could fall victim to the siren song of autocracy if its citizens were not vigilant. After her historic career in public service, she was chair of an organization called the National Democratic Institute, helping young democracies build independent court systems and a vibrant civil society.
She spoke to me about this important work and understood that for democracies to endure, they must offer more than promises. In one of her last interviews, Madeleine Albright offered a warning that we in this Senate should be wise to remember. She said:
What is important is that democracy has to deliver. People
want to vote and eat. And therefore it is very important for
democracies, and certainly for the world's oldest, to
understand the rule of law--because corruption is the cancer
of democracy . . . The people need to be the beneficiaries of
[democracy].
Likely because of her family's own experience with fleeing tyranny, Madeleine Albright was quicker than many at recognizing dictators when she saw them. She first met Vladimir Putin in the year 2000, 1 year after his meteoric rise from a mid-level, mediocre KGB apparatchik to President of the Russian Federation. She recorded her first impressions of Vladimir Putin over 20 years ago. She wrote:
Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian.
She went on to note presciently that Putin was ``embarrassed about what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.''
The violence and destruction that Vladimir Putin is willing to wage in pursuit of this delusion to make Russia great again is now horrifyingly obvious to the entire world.
Let me say at the outset: I have no quarrel with the people of Russia. They are good people and have a great history. There were chapters in there that were oppressive and terrible to their neighbors and the countries that suffered under Stalin and the reach of the Soviet Union. But at their heart, I believe the Russians are good people. Sadly, I cannot say the same about their leader.
The brutal assault on Ukraine is now in its second month. Yesterday, at the water tower in downtown Chicago, we had a rally for Ukrainians. It was cold. This time of year, it is cold in Chicago. It was probably 30 degrees, and the wind was blowing. But what a crowd showed up-- several hundred people--many bearing Ukrainian flags and, of course, proud of their Ukrainian heritage, but from so many other places as well. Groups of people were there who were Indian Americans who wanted to show support.
I was proud that the Baltic Americans--Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians--once again were there in force. I was also proud that the Polish people came, because they have a special kinship to Ukraine at this moment in history.
Poland is accepting more refugees from Ukraine than any other nation and is making great personal sacrifice to do it.
As the Polish Ambassador told us 2 weeks ago, when people get off that train for the first stop in Poland, finally, they are on safe soil, out of Ukraine. They don't look for people--soldiers and police-- to guide them. What they find is that people are in their cars, waiting, with the doors open, to bring them in even if they are total strangers.
The Polish Ambassador said: You don't see any refugee camps in Poland.
No. People are going into the homes of other Polish families and are being welcomed into those homes.
He said: The reason we are feeling this way about our neighbors is that, when it happened to us many years ago, no one would take us in. We remember those days.
What a reminder to us in the United States.
You know, when the President said last week that he wants to accept 100,000 refugees from Ukraine, I applauded it, as did others, but just for a point of reference, a nation of 5 million, known as Ireland, has also agreed to accept 100,000 refugees. So the United States is showing some charity, but we can do more. We shouldn't limit it just to refugees from Ukraine. There are refugees from wars and calamities around the world who also need an opportunity to be in a safe place. The United States has enjoyed that reputation for almost 80 years, and we did it after World War II. We should return to those days.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees calculates that 10 million Ukrainians--almost a fourth of the population--have been driven from their homes and displaced--1 out of 4. Another 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring nations, especially to Poland. The city of Warsaw alone is admitting 1,000 Ukrainian children to its schools every day--1,000 Ukrainian kids a day into Poland.
Joe Biden, our President, understands the same truth that Madeleine Albright saw--that the struggle between dictatorships and democracy did not end with the defeat of Nazism or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It continues in this century, and Ukraine is now the new frontline in this old battle.
Critics of the President's will no doubt fixate on one unscripted line of his speech in Poland. I say to those critics: Who among you has not uttered the same thought? Who doubts for one second this world would be more secure without the likes of such a tyrant?
The Russian people have to make that decision, and if they are given the truth, I am sure they will make the right decision. That is why Vladimir Putin is trying to control the media. The Russian people will decide for themselves whether Putin stays or goes.
The duty of democracy is to make sure that people have the final word as to their own destinies within their own borders. President Biden is leading a historic effort of the NATO alliance on behalf of the people of Ukraine. I salute him for his leadership.
I yield the floor.
Recognition of the Majority Leader