Executive Session

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - May 19, 2005)

NOMINATION OF PRISCILLA RICHMAN OWEN TO BE UNITED STATES CIRCUIT JUDGE FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT--Resumed

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Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I thank the distinguished Senator from West Virginia for his extraordinary analysis and understanding of the Constitution which he has constantly been the keeper of in the Senate.

We are in a remarkable moment of confrontation. This is a great institution, or at least it always has been, and it is looked up to by people all over the world. Caught up as we are now in this moment of partisan ideological division of a raw reach for power, the Congress itself is daily dropping in its regard by the American people. Rather than reaching across the aisle to grapple with the real crises that face our Nation, the Republican leadership keeps moving unilaterally to change the way this institution has worked, and not for the better.

Those of us who have had the privilege of being here for some period of time--I have been here for 22 years; Senator Byrd has been here almost 50; Senator Kennedy, Senator Stevens, and others have also served for a significant period of time--but brief as my stay has been, I find myself now I think No. 18 in seniority, which means 82 Senators have come and gone during the time I have been here. I have had a chance to know many of them going back to the time of Barry Goldwater, John Stennis, Russell Long, and others. Never in that whole period of time I have served have I ever seen this institution behaving the way it does today.

Colleagues who came to do the same good as colleagues on the other side of the aisle, locked out of conference committees, hearings that do not take place when they ought to; oversight that does not occur as it used to. This institution is being damaged daily by the partisanship, the bitter ideological divide that is preventing good people on both sides of the aisle from doing good business for the American people; from finding real solutions to the real problems of real concern to average families all across our country, who cannot pay their health care bills, who are losing jobs abroad, who worry about the twin deficits of the budget of our country and of our trade; who see extraordinary threats to community as kids do not get the education they ought to. All this time we have been spending weeks, if not months, caught up discussing a nuclear option, discussing a few judges out of the two hundred, 208 or so, who have been nominated and approved by this President.

The Senate is now watching this struggle take place, countless hours consumed by an effort to change the rules by breaking the rules. If my colleagues want to change the rules, use the rules to change the rules. Do not subvert the system. Do not play a cute parliamentary game that has been untouched over 200 years.

This is a stunning moment. The problem is that words spoken in this Chamber do not even fully convey the importance of this moment. This is, in fact, one of those times the Founding Fathers and countless other statesmen of history have warned us against.

Henry Clay said: The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim, denounces it and excites the public odium and the public hatred to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

James Madison said: Where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted. ..... The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

What we are going to see if this happens is the judiciary of the United States entirely put into the hands of the Presidency, period. The advice and consent will be wiped out, barring displays of courage that we have not seen recently, because people will come, as they did in our committee most recently, to say, well, we just had an election and the President won and the President has the right to his appointments, that is it, end of issue. Gone, the divisions; gone, the test; gone, the judgment we were supposed to apply as a separate and coequal branch of Government.

That is what the Founding Fathers wrote. They did not give the President the ability to have whoever that President wants. That is what is written into the Constitution, that every single one of us went to the well of this body and raised our hands and swore to uphold.

We did not swear to uphold the majority leader. We did not swear to uphold the President. We did not swear to uphold our party. We swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and that is our duty.

Lord Acton said it maybe best: All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Thomas Jefferson said: I hope our wisdom will grow with our power and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

If my colleagues want to use the power of ending a filibuster, just have the filibuster for week after week and let people stand up and make their arguments. If the arguments have no currency, believe me, between the press, public opinion, the bloggers, and C-SPAN, this country will rise up and they will get their 60 votes if they deserve them. That is an up-or-down vote of its own kind.

If it were compelling enough, as it was with the Civil Rights Act, or compelling enough as it has been in other great confrontations in this body, we have always found our way to make it happen. We have always done it without the rules. We are a Nation that has listened to some remarkable men and women in remarkable debates about how we as a Nation are different in balancing power and protecting the people and the institutions that we set up to protect the people. We are not here as an institution to protect an ideology. We are not here as an institution to protect a party. We are here to protect collectively the Government of the United States of America that is made up of those brilliant words that were fought over so diligently and remarkably in Philadelphia and which have served us so well all of these years.

Now all of a sudden in 2005, feeling the flush of victory in an election that was close, controlling two branches of Government, elected officials, people who serve at the grace of that Constitution for a brief period of time, at the sufferance of the people who vote for us, those people are choosing to serve the moment, not to serve history, not to serve precedent, not to serve common sense, not to serve even the real interests of the American people, but to serve a narrowly defined, elected, official, leadership-determined, ideological purpose.

I believe the real interests of Americans are best served by remembering that the greatest strength and the greatest virtue of our democracy is not that it gives power to the majority, which is easy to exercise, easy to understand, easy to abuse; the great virtue of the American system of Government and of our democracy is the protection it provides to the minority. That is what is special about America. That is what makes us different from everybody else.

That is what lives are being lost for, to tell people in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is what you ought to embrace--the full measure of democracy, not some limited tricky little measure where, in the flush of victory, you change the rules.

What would we say about this if it was another country that we had helped to be the country they are, embracing our democracy, but they started to play those kinds of games and there was suddenly an abuse of rules that had been set up that everybody understood were there to make the democracy work effectively?

It is precisely the protection of the minority that makes our democracy so respected and so awesome to people all over this planet.

This is a dangerous time for our democracy. What is at stake here is something far greater than the confirmation of a few judges. Let there be no doubt that line was drawn clearly here this morning because the deputy leader offered to have four judges confirmed. We could have confirmed four judges right here, today, this morning.

No, no, no. This is a division. This is a moment of confrontation being sought by the leadership on the other side of the aisle. What is at stake is something far greater than any of the individual judges. It is defined by the refusal to accept the offer to do those judges today. We could have gotten the President's percentage up from 95 to whatever, 98 percent. But, no, we do not want that. That will change the focus.

No matter how much time is spent on the life story of Priscilla Owen, we all know the choice of this particular judgeship and of just staying on this judgeship and not trying to have other judgeships represents, in fact, a choice. It is a smokescreen for what this fight is really all about. It is not about these few judges. We could have confirmed those judges. But the Republican leadership is fundamentally determined to deny the minority the right to hold the Executive accountable for such judgments as we might make about the lifetime appointment of those judges.

I heard both sides out here. Some Members of our side did call for up-or-down votes when that was the argument that best served them. But, guess what, when they didn't get it, they didn't call for a change in the rules, and they did not try to break the rules to change the rules. They used their best argument, but they respected the institution.

That is not what is happening today. So we can forget about who said what when. The real fight is about the Senate. The real fight is about the Constitution. The real fight is about who we are and what kind of country we are going to be and how we behave and what kind of example we set to young kids in school today who read the history books and dream someday of being a Senator and perhaps joining the world's greatest deliberative body.

This is about George Bush and Karl Rove and the Republican leadership and their quest for absolute control over who goes to the Supreme Court and to the judgeships across this country. This is about carrying, beyond this branch of Government, power into another branch of Government that is supposed to be separate. This is about the gratification of immediate ideological goals and the pursuit of power, regardless of the long-term consequences to the Senate, the Congress, or the Constitution of the country. To get what they want, the leadership has acquiesced to outside forces. Not even the precedents and history and quality of this institution are guiding them. It is an outside hand.

As John Danforth, with whom many of us had the privilege of serving here, a greatly respected former Republican Senator--he was George Bush's choice as a special envoy to Darfur. He was George Bush's choice to go to the United Nations. He is, above all, as all of us know, a man of enormous faith, a respected minister, and a leader in his church. Here is what he wrote a few weeks ago:

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

So spoke Senator John Danforth, Republican.

Yet, despite Senator Danforth's warning, most of my colleagues stay right on script in this fight for history, this fight for principle, and this fight for rights. On script, they allow our cherished principles to be abused and glossed over as the debate sort of develops or drops down into a competition of hollow sound bites. But script and sound bite are not what should dictate what happens here, not in the Senate. Conscience and principle ought to dictate what happens here. There have to be Senators prepared to stand up and do their duty as U.S. Senators, not Senators of their party.

My distinguished colleague, Senator Voinovich, recently showed courage in the Foreign Relations Committee when he suddenly stopped the proceedings of the committee and he said: I am not comfortable with what is happening here. My conscience tells me we ought to stop and take a better look.

Guess what happened. He was vilified on talk radio and in certain partisan circles for having gone off script.

Senator Chafee of Rhode Island, 4 years here, stands up and says: Wow, that is the first time in 4 years I have ever seen anybody do that.

What? The first time in 4 years a Senator saw another Senator stop and think for himself and exercise conscience and go off script? What kind of statement is that about what has happened here? It is not controversial, my friends. It is a sad statement about the Senate, and it underscores what is happening here now.

Independence and conscience and principle are really what is at stake here, the independence of the

Senate, the independence of the judiciary from an administration that is just hell-bent for leather determined to get its way. Heavens knows what leverage will be exerted in these next hours as we see so much on the table, with military bases closing and other issues--who knows? Independence of the Senate, a special institution in our Government, a place where things purposefully slow down, where they find their balance--that is what the Senate was created for.

It is surprising and disturbing that members of the Republican leadership know what is at stake, but they have actually worked with the Republican administration to spreads things that aren't true. I don't know what happened to truth around here. I don't know what happened to truth in the discussion of great issues before this country.

But the truth is, in the end, none of the constitutional issues that have been put forward--and today's Republican leadership--none of them stand up. They do not stand scrutiny. They are hollow, tortured, poll-tested statements. The whole argument about the Constitution and up-or-down votes or ``unprecedented''--the word ``unprecedented'' has been used. They sound good, but they are not true, and we know it. Yet Senators continue to fall in line, turning out the script, turning out the phases that have to be repeated. It is not a true representation of the Constitution, of history, or the rights of Senators.

Personally, I believe there would be a lot more outrage in the Nation and in the media if the value of truth had not been so diminished over the last years. We have a budget that comes trillions of dollars short of counting every dollar we plan to spend, but, oh no, there is no accountability. We have a budget that doesn't even count the interest on the debt. Find me an accountant in a business in America who doesn't put the interest on the debt that they owe in the accounting, and they would be fired. We do not do it. No accountability.

We have had a Medicare actuary who was forced at risk of losing his job to lie about what the costs would be of a prescription drug bill and lie to the Congress. No accountability. We have had falsified numbers in Iraq, on everything from the cost of the war to the number of troops that have been trained to the slam dunk on intelligence--no accountability. We have an administration that continues to want to fund fake newscasts paid for by the American people, without disclaimer, and mislead people across America.

In fact, the administration's willingness to consistently abandon the truth I think has done great damage to the American people's willingness to believe anything any of us say. They are less willing to listen. They are less willing to trust or take anything said seriously.

Now we find ourselves in a struggle between a great political tradition in the United States that seeks to find the common ground, do the common good, and we have a new ethic on any given issue, where any means justifies the ends of victory no matter what. It is a new view that says, if you don't like the facts, just change them. If you can't win by playing by the rules, just rewrite them. Witness what happened with TOM DELAY.

The new view says if you can't win a debate on the strength of your arguments, then go ahead and demonize your opponents regardless of whether it is true. The new view says it is okay to ignore the overwhelming public interest as long as you can get away with it.

This time the Republican leadership has gone the farthest to get away with it, hoping to convince Americans that by breaking the Senate rules, they are actually acting to defend the Constitution, honor the words of our Founding Fathers, and avert a judicial crisis.

This debate is not fueled by an effort to protect the Constitution. It is fueled by ideology. It is not fueled by a shortage of judges on the bench because, as the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee has made clear, we have the best record of appointing them and the lowest vacancies in years.

The facts have been repeatedly cleared up, again and again, and repeatedly they are brushed aside with the old adage that if you throw enough mud and you repeat something that is not true enough, enough people may come to believe it. Over 95 percent of all judges already approved. I have been here since 1985 and I have probably voted for a thousand judges. I have not counted them all. For Ronald Reagan, for George Herbert Walker Bush, for President George Bush. What have we got? Ten who have not been confirmed?

The Bush administration and their allies in Congress hope to get away with this by selling words to the public on a ``team'' the public would never buy if there was a referee who put real facts in front of the American people. Unfortunately, words with great meaning--Constitution, Founding Fathers, history, precedent--all of these are being twisted and cheated of their full meaning and of their full import in the process.

In the end, the American people are being underestimated by this administration. They may work their will here; I don't know yet. We do not know. Certainly they have a lot of cards to play. But in the end, Americans value the Constitution, and over time this will be felt. In the end, Americans understand that the strength of our democracy is best judged by the enduring strength of our minority and its ability to be heard. And Americans cherish the ability of the minority to be heard.

When Americans first heard the term ``nuclear option,'' they kind of recoiled--appropriately. They were confident that dismantling the filibuster and silencing the minority would have as catastrophic an effect on our democracy as a nuclear blast would on our security. But the majority's action was not to back off and to say, okay, we will play by the rules. The majority's reaction was to change the slogan. So in an act of transparent hypocrisy, the minority changed the slogan from ``nuclear option'' to ``constitutional option.'' George Orwell would be pleased. They embarked on a series of hollow arguments based on mythical constitutional provisions confident that if you just say it, somebody will believe it.

You can change the slogan, but you cannot change the fact that diminishing the rights of the minority diminishes the spirit and the substance of our Constitution and the foundation of our Government. Argument after argument put forward by the Bush Republican leadership is just plain false. False. I have heard it argued that our Constitution mandates specific protocol of voting for judges. No. They have used their new catchphrase, up-or-down votes, hundreds of times in recent days. But those words do not appear once in our Constitution. They are not even subliminally in the Constitution in the advice and consent and separateness of power given to the Senate and the right of the Senate to make its own rules.

No one should be fooled. Those phrases do not mean constitutional. They do not mean democratic.

They do not mean fair. They are phrases that are code for dissent-proof, minority-proof, and filibuster-proof. There is nothing in our Constitution or our history to suggest that the nominee of any President is so special as to be excused from the scrutiny of the minority or granted immunity from the tools of democracy that protect that minority.

I didn't win, but I can guarantee this: Had I been President, I would not have contemplated supporting or sending a request to change what I have viewed as something of value in the entire time I have been here in the Senate. Never would have occurred to me. It would have occurred to me to send people up here who could win the support of people on both sides. It would have occurred to me to bring the members of the Judiciary Committee together and sit them down and work together to come to a common understanding of what sort of standard we ought to apply and let the American people share that standard.

There is nothing in our Constitution or in history to suggest the President ought to be granted immunity from the tools of democracy. And that is what will happen.

My colleagues are well aware that the power of advice and consent is granted to the Senate and the Constitution says absolutely nothing about how the Senate will proceed to provide advice and consent. And the words advice and consent are there in their duality because advice is one thing and consent is another. You can withhold your consent or you can give your consent. You can say yes, or you can say nothing if you do not vote. And if you do not vote, you have withheld your consent.

It didn't take long before the new Congress exercised its constitutional powers in 1795. Senators who were friends and colleagues of the Founders themselves, who surely knew their intent, turned around and defeated George Washington's nomination of George Rutledge to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1968, Republican Senator Robert Griffin captured the spirit of that event when he said:

That action in 1795 said to the President then in office and to future presidents, don't expect the Senate to be a rubber stamp. We have an independent and coequal responsibility in the appointing process and we intend to exercise that responsibility as those who drafted the Constitution so clearly intended.

The Constitution did not mandate a rubberstamp for George Washington and the Constitution doesn't mandate a rubberstamp for George Bush today.

In 1795, the rejection of Washington's nominee was heralded as the Constitution working, not failing. There is no doubt that an active, coequal partnership was intended. That resounding rejection of George Washington, our revolutionary leader, helped to seal the death of the monarchy in this country.

The genius of empowering the Senate and the minority was that by limiting the executive, the Senate legitimized the executive. So when I hear my colleagues come to the Senate arguing that the Constitution mandates the will of the majority always trumps the minority, I don't hear the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. I don't see or hear a respect for what happened in 1795. I don't hear the same blind activism that characterizes the judges they intend to enforce on the Federal bench. The actions of some Senators, in fact, today come closer to rewriting the Constitution than defending it.

Another argument we have heard is that the filibuster itself is unconstitutional. That has been made. That argument is deeply flawed. The Constitution in Article I, section 5 granted each house the power to ``determine the rules of its proceedings.'' That is the Constitution of the United States.

Every Senator went down there, raised his or her hand, and swore to defend the Constitution. And the Constitution says we have the power to determine our rules and we have a rule by which we determine the rules, and the current rule says you have to have a supermajority to change the rules. But, no, in the flush of victory, in a moment of ideological excess, people are going to come in and change the rule by breaking the rule of the Senate that the Constitution itself enshrines. Shame. That is a disgrace to the oath and a disgrace to the history and a disgrace to what this institution stands for and to the quality of our democracy that we export at the lives of young Americans abroad.

It is wrong, fundamentally wrong.

Over the past 200 years, our predecessors in the Senate have taken the role of ``consent'' very seriously. They have created time-tested rules to assure the rights of the minorities and to balance the power of government. With a hold, a so-called hold, a single Senator can delay a Presidential nominee. A single committee chairman can block a nomination by simply refusing to hold hearings.

I saw Senator Helms do that any number of times. I tried to get a hearing. We tried to get the possibility of a Governor of the United States of America, the Governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, nominated to be the Ambassador to go to Mexico. Senator Helms: no hearing. Wouldn't hear of it. It could not happen. Nomination killed.

What is this game that is being played back and forth about who said what, when? We all know how this place has worked all these years. These rules were not created by the Democratic Party when George Bush was elected President. The filibuster was used as early as 1790 by Senators from Virginia and South Carolina who filibustered against a bill to locate the first Congress in Philadelphia. That was a filibuster of one because in 1790, as Senator Byrd has pointed out, you needed unanimous consent to end the debate. They did change that rule, but they changed that rule by using the rules of the Senate, not by breaking them.

Think about it. Those legislators and friends and even the Founders themselves permitted a filibuster of one. Knowing that, today's activist arguments buckle under the weight of history. The unfortunate truth is that some Senators have now fashioned themselves as activist legal scholars using a false reading of the Constitution to paint their opponents as obstructionists while pursuing their political agenda at the expense of our democracy.

I think some of my colleagues forget that the Senate was designed specifically to be the moderating check on a President. And guess what. We have done unbelievably well as a nation these 200 years. We are the envy of people all across this planet. There is not one of us whose heart does not fill with pride, who is not astounded at what we can do and have done, and what we can achieve in America, and the stories of individual Senators in this Chamber who have risen from adverse circumstances, and nothing, to be able to represent people in their States. It is a stunning story. It is a story based on that respect for the law and based on the mutual respect that has always guided this great institution. I think some of my colleagues have lost track of that.

My colleagues also forget, as they demonize the filibuster, it has been a force for the good. Farmers don't forget that. There are a lot of farmers in the Midwest in our country. They don't forget when Senators from rural States used the filibuster to force Congress to respond to a crisis that left thousands of farmers on the brink of bankruptcy in 1985. The big oil companies don't forget it. That don't forget when Senators used the filibuster to defeat massive tax giveaways that they were lobbying for in 1981. And I don't forget it, when, 10 years ago, I came to the floor and filibustered to prevent a bill that would have gutted public health and safety and consumer and environmental protections. That bill never passed, and we know the country is better for it.

Some Senators come to the floor with a practical argument about our courts. They claim that because we have not rubberstamped each and every one of George Bush's nominees, the Nation faces a crisis because of a shortage of judges on the bench. It is not true. How can you keep coming to the floor of the Senate saying things that are just plain not true?

Over 95 percent of the President's nominees have been confirmed. Our courts today have the lowest vacancy rate they have had in years. Enough of that argument.

What is threatened is a delicately balanced system that for 214 years successfully prevented the Executive from usurping power that was granted in good faith by the American people. And that threat manifests itself in this nuclear option that threatens the character, the core of this institution.

The integrity of this Senate is threatened when the majority attempts to change the rules by breaking the rules. The balance of power is threatened when the power of advice and consent is gutted. It will be gone. Whatever nominees they want will be confirmed, unless you happen to find a few people who will stand up to the pressure exerted on their States' need or their reelection need or the other needs that the Founding Fathers wanted to protect Senators against.

Our democracy is threatened when we set the dangerous precedent that minority rights will be silenced at the convenience of the majority. I believe our courts and the justice this rule is meant to deliver are threatened, in the end, by some of these judges who have been nominated.

As I said, that is not what this is fundamentally, in the end, about. It is about getting everything you want when you want it.

I will wrap up in a moment, Mr. President.

Some of my colleagues have argued that Democrats filibuster these judges because we simply dislike them or disagree on ideology or policy. Well, there may be some disagreement on things they have said or the way they have approached their courts. We saw what Attorney General Gonzales has said about Priscilla Owen, that her dissent in In re Jane Doe was an ``unconscionable act of judicial activism.'' But the point is, we have confirmed countless judges with whom we disagree on countless issues. If we have confirmed over 200 judges of the President of the United States, you know we do not agree with them on many of the issues that they brought to the bench, but they brought a fundamental fairness or they brought a record that we did not believe ought to be disputed.

I think we have shown our good faith on the approach to the confirmation of judges. We have confirmed

countless judges because we believed they were impartial and responsible arbiters of the law. It is an activist judge, it is a judge with a particular--many of the arguments have been made; I am not going to go through them now--but those arguments have been eloquently made with specificity as to these few judges. It is judges who want to rewrite our laws from the bench whom we believe are unqualified for a lifetime appointment. And we stand against them, Mr. President, not as a threat to the Constitution, but in defense of the Constitution.

We have also been accused of unprecedented acts with respect to these nominations. Well, I am not going to go back into all that history. A lot of my colleagues have talked about it in the last days. But you just cannot come out here with a straight face, on either side--both sides have engaged in delaying some nominees--many of them were not even allowed out of the committee when President Clinton was in. Waited years; never got out. That does not make it all right, but it is the way it works as we fight this process of finding people who meet the consensus of the Senate.

Did you hear the minority then hide behind a mythical constitutional value? No. Did you hear the minority stand up and assert a constitutional violation or the rules of the Senate ought to be changed? No. The majority leader himself has voted to filibuster a nominee. It does not matter whether it is 1, 2, or 10 filibusters, a filibuster is a filibuster.

President Johnson's nominee to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas, was defeated with a filibuster.

Tennessee Republican Howard Baker articulated the minority's position saying:

The majority is not always right all of the time. And it is clear and predictable that the people of America, in their compassionate wisdom, require the protection of the rights of the minority as well as the implementation of the will of the majority.

Throughout our history, Presidents and majorities have always had to govern a nation where minority rights are protected. Until this day, Presidents of the majority have respected that tradition. They were humbled by it. They were inspired by it, by the lessons of history that colleagues seem to have forgotten today.

In 1937, President Roosevelt attempted to court pack and assert his influence. His own party said no. Thomas Jefferson once attempted to impeach a Supreme Court Justice who disagreed with his political agenda. His own party said no.

When my colleagues complain of lack of precedent, remember those precedents. They were fair, and they were just. They respected the Constitution and they defended the judiciary. Our predecessors stood up to their own party leaders because they valued the real strength of our democracy more than the short-term success of a political agenda of the moment. And the question for all of us here is: Are we going to live up to that test?

Recent predecessors of Senate Republicans have repeatedly urged respect for this--their own party Members, Members of the Republican Party, people of extraordinary respect and even reverence. Former Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker said, destroying the right to the filibuster:

would topple one of the pillars of American democracy, the protection of minority rights from majority rule.

Former Senator Chuck Mathias said:

The Senate is not a parliamentary speedway, nor should it be.

Former Republican Senator Bill Armstrong said:

Having served in the majority and in the minority, I know it's worthwhile to have the minority empowered. As a conservative, I think there is a value to having a constraint on the majority.

My colleagues should defend their judges, but do it without tearing down the Constitution and our Founding Fathers, or destroying the rules and character of this great institution. Defend your judges without ceding dangerous and corruptive levels of power to the executive branch of Government. Defend your judges without erasing 214 years of wisdom and sacrifice that raised this Nation from tyranny and chaos and spread freedom across the globe. Our Founding Fathers would shudder to see how easily forces from outside of the mainstream now seem to effortlessly push people toward conduct the American people don't want for their elected leaders, abusing power, inserting the Government into our private lives, injecting religion into debates on public policy, jumping through hoops to ingratiate themselves to their party base, while step by step and day by day real problems that keep American families up at night fall by the wayside in Washington.

Congress and our democracy itself are being tested this week and next and will be tested in this vote. We each have to ask ourselves individually, as a matter of conscience, what are we prepared to do? I have attended the Senate prayer breakfast with colleagues here. I know this is a place of great faith and a place of real concern. I ask my colleagues to look into their souls and ask themselves, is this the right thing to be doing for the long-term interests of our Nation?

For those in this Chamber who have reservations about the choices their leadership has made and worry about the possible repercussions on our Constitution and democracy, stop over the weekend and look at history and find the courage to do what is right. History has always remembered and found a place for those who are courageous, and it will remember the courageous few who live up to their responsibility now and speak truth to power when the Senate is tested, so that power doesn't go unchecked.

The Senate and the country need Senators of courage who are prepared to make their mark on history by standing with past profiles in courage and defending not party, not partisanship, but defending principle, defending the Constitution, and defending democracy itself.

I yield the floor.

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