Filling the Supreme Court Vacancy
Floor Speech
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Mr. REID. Mr. President, we can play around all we want with the Supreme Court and what the Constitution says or doesn't say, but we know that the Constitution says that the President shall--not may, but shall--nominate Supreme Court Justices. He has an obligation. He has to do that. The Constitution is also very affirmative: There has to be advice and consent. That is what we are instructed in the Constitution.
It is a little strange how we can have from the Republicans advice and consent when the vast majority of the Republicans won't even meet with the man. They refuse to hold hearings and certainly to have a vote.
So I don't know how anyone is reading the Constitution, but we need to do our job. We are not doing our job when we don't hold hearings and have a vote. We shouldn't be here talking about Supreme Court nominees being far left or far right or moderate.
To show how off track this has gotten, 2 days ago the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the senior Senator from Iowa, gave a speech here. Guess who he was attacking. Justice Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He said to the Chief Justice: Heal yourself. The Chief Justice. Is there anyone in the world--anyone in the United States, anyone in the legal field, anyone in the political field--who thinks he is some kind of crazy liberal, John Roberts, who worked on the court with Merrick Garland? They wrote opinions together. They agreed almost 90 percent of the time on their opinions.
So it is really too bad that now we are here with a Supreme Court Justice--for the first time in the history of the country, because we are in the final year of a Presidency, we are not going to do anything. We are going to wait. In the meantime, justice will be delayed. We have already had a significant number of tied, 4-to-4 decisions by the Court, and, using the logic of the Republicans, this is going to go on for another 18 months. So it is unfortunate that this has turned into something that has never happened before.
They go back and keep repeating: The Biden rule. The Biden rule. The Biden rule.
The year he gave that speech--and he gave a speech at Georgetown University just a week ago saying: Read my speech. Read the whole thing.
And what was the result of his action as chairman of the committee that year? He brought nominations to the floor even though they didn't get enough votes in the committee to be reported. The nominees lost in the Judiciary Committee, but Biden brought them here anyway.
There was an op-ed written by one of my predecessors, former Democratic leader George Mitchell, a stunningly good Senator from Maine. He wrote that 2 days ago. It appeared in a Boston newspaper. He said that when Clarence Thomas came before the Senate, he had lost in the committee. He didn't get enough votes to be reported out of the committee. Biden reported him out anyway: Bring him to the floor. Let's have a debate.
That is what Senator Mitchell talked about. We had a debate. And he had pressure. It wasn't tremendous, but he had pressure. People asked: Why don't you filibuster him? He said: I am not going to filibuster. Let's have a vote, and that is the way it used to be done. He had 52 votes. Could that have been stopped? Of course. Would the Court have been better? Observers can make the determination themselves as to whether we would be better off without Clarence Thomas on that Court. But the fact is he could have been stopped easily, and it wasn't done.
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