Judicial Nominations

JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS

Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, this morning I rise to talk about what has been happening in this Chamber with regard to judicial nominations, and especially those nominations that have been put forward by the President with respect to the circuit courts.

The court of appeals is that branch in our Federal court system which is directly under the Supreme Court, an incredibly important place where a lot of judicial precedent is set.

We have had several judges being filibustered this year by the other side; just recently, Charles Pickering, a wonderful man with incredible qualifications, incredible political courage. With all the debate that happened about him and his qualifications-people can check the Congressional Record for it-but the bottom line is this man deserves an up-or-down vote. If he is granted an up-or-down vote, he would be approved because he was able to get 54 votes against 43 negative votes. Unfortunately, there is a minority in the Senate choosing to filibuster. That 54 votes should be enough to put him on the circuit court where he deserves to be.

I have no objection to people voting against judges. That is their right to do under the Constitution. But the Constitution specifically spells out only five instances where a supermajority is required in the Senate for approval, and moving to the consideration or the approval of the President's judicial nominees is not on that list.

Why is this debate so important to have on whether we should allow the Senate to filibuster judges or whether we should just have straight up-or-down votes on judges after a good amount of debate? If one side, meaning one political party, chooses to filibuster judges, the other side is going to be forced to filibuster. In other words, a precedent is set.

Someday the Democrats will get back in power in the White House and will be sending judges up to this body, and if they continue to filibuster the President's nominees, a precedent will be set, and our side will have no choice but to filibuster their judges. The reason is very simple: If they filibuster more conservative type judges, and we do not filibuster theirs, our court system will just go further and further to the left.

Politics and the judiciary-we are supposed to try to separate those as much as possible, even though it is impossible to completely separate them.

So, Madam President, I appeal to our colleagues on the other side that this obstructionism purely for political gain is a dangerous precedent to set in the Senate. We need to become statesmen in this body and do what is right for our Republic. This is really about the future of our Republic. Judges and the third branch of our Government have to have somewhat independence from the legislative branch and from the executive branch. It is critical, I believe, that we have a fair process going forward.

The system really is broken at this point. Another problem we are going to face in the future by staging this political battle on judges is that good people are not going to want to go through the nomination. Miguel Estrada is the perfect example. He was an extraordinary nominee who would have made an extraordinary judge and the ugliness this process has become resulted in him asking the President to withdraw his nomination. The toll of was too great on him and on his family. He could not take it anymore.

If we continue to drag more nominees through this political mess, it is going to be harder to get good people, the kind of people we want serving on the bench.

I make this appeal to my colleagues: This nonsense going on with filibustering circuit court judges needs to stop. I respect the fact that Senators want complete debate. We should have full debate on judges. But once they have their full debate, their complete investigation, questions are asked and answered, then we need an up-or-down vote, straight up-or-down vote. There is no place in the judicial nomination process for filibustering. If we do not correct this problem, and fix this broken process the future our judicial system will be hurt and it will be a great disservice to all Americans.

I yield the floor.