[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 76 (Thursday, June 3, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6423-S6425]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NOMINATION OF JUDITH C. HERRERA TO BE UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the next nomination.
The legislative clerk read the nomination of Judith C. Herrera, of
New Mexico, to be United States District Judge for the District of New
Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I rise in support of a New Mexican named
Judith Herrera to be United States District Judge for the District of
New Mexico. I believe everyone knows that the administration of justice
is one of the most significant pillars of good government. I think in
this instance the President has sent us an extraordinary person to be a
judge in the District of New Mexico.
We have a vacancy there because of a justice who took senior status.
We have a tremendous overload, and I am very pleased that we finally
got to the point where we could have another judge. Maybe we can begin
to take care of this enormous overload. I thank everyone who worked on
this nomination. Her credentials are impeccable. Every group that
needed to recommended her.
Judith Herrera is a resident of Santa Fe, NM. She attended the
University of New Mexico.
She then attended the Georgetown University Law Center where she
earned her law degree.
We, in New Mexico, are fortunate that Judy decided to return to New
Mexico upon completion of her law degree.
She began her career in public service shortly after returning to New
Mexico, serving on the Santa Fe City Council from 1981 to 1986.
She continued her service by sitting on the boards of St. Vincent
Hospital in Santa Fe, St. Michael's High School Foundation, also in
Santa Fe, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
She has practiced law for more than 20 years in New Mexico, amassing
in impressive resume and reputation in the legal community.
I am confident she will be an outstanding member of the federal
judiciary.
I look forward to Judy Herrera's tenure on the bench.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I join my colleague, Senator Domenici,
in urging the Senate to support this nomination. Judith Herrera is very
qualified. I compliment the President for nominating her for this
position. I compliment my colleague for recommending that nomination.
She will serve us well on the district court in New Mexico.
Ms. Herrera began her career as a prosecutor, and has spent many
years in private practice. Currently, she is a partner at Herrera,
Long, Pound & Komer in Santa Fe, NM. She has also served on the Santa
Fe City Council and on the University of New Mexico's Board of Regents.
Mrs. Herrera has served with distinction in all of these positions.
I urge my fellow Senators to support her nomination.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise today to express my strong support
for the confirmation of Judith Herrera, who has been nominated to the
United States District Court for the District of New Mexico.
Ms. Herrera is an exceptional nominee and has a distinguished record
of service in both the private and public sectors. After graduating
from Georgetown Law School, Ms. Herrera worked as an Assistant District
Attorney in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she prosecuted a variety of
misdemeanor and felony offenses. She later entered the private sector
and practiced in the areas of education and employment law.
Ms. Herrera distinguished herself as one of the most effective
advocates in New Mexico for employers defending wrongful discharge and
discrimination cases. She later founded her own law firm, and currently
serves as shareholder and president of that firm. Ms. Herrera has also
served the local community of Santa Fe in a variety of ways. She was a
member of the Santa Fe City Council, the Board of Trustees for St.
Vincent Hospital, and the Board of Regents for the University of New
Mexico. Ms. Herrera's broad experience as a trial attorney and her many
hours of community service have prepared her for the challenges she
will face as a Federal judge. I am confident that she will make a fine
addition to the federal bench in the District of New Mexico.
I yield the floor.
Mr. LEAHY. Today the Senate is proceeding to confirm Judith Herrera
to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. Ms. Herrera
is a partner with the Santa Fe firm of Herrera, Long, Pound & Komer,
which she co-founded in 1987. She appears in court frequently on behalf
of employers, and their insurance companies, serving as defense counsel
in employment discrimination and wrongful discharge cases. Before
starting this practice, she handled education cases and also served
briefly as a local prosecutor. She also previously served on the Sante
Fe City Council. She has the support of both of her home-state
Senators.
Democratic support for the confirmation of Ms. Herrera, an active
Republican, is yet another example of our extraordinary cooperation in
this Presidential election year. Today's confirmation will make the
180th judicial nominee to be confirmed since this President took
office. With 80 lifetime judicial appointments confirmed in just the
past year and a half alone, the Senate has confirmed more Federal
judges than were confirmed during the all of 1995 and 1996, when
Republicans first controlled the Senate and President Clinton was in
the White House. It also exceeds the 2-year total for the last Congress
of the Clinton administration, when Republicans held the Senate. This
Senate has now confirmed more Federal judges than were confirmed during
either Congress leading to a presidential election with a Democratic
President and Republican Senate majority in 1996 and 2000.
This marks the 180th judicial confirmation since President Bush took
office. That is more than President Reagan, the acknowledged all-time
champion, achieved in his entire 4-year Presidential term from 1981
through 1984 working hand in hand with a Republican Senate majority. It
is more than President Clinton was able to achieve in his entire 4-year
Presidential term from 1993 through 1996, having to work with a
Republican Senate majority during 1995 and 1996.
I have already noted that at the Republican Senate leadership has
again chosen to avoid debate of the nomination of J. Leon Holmes and
Judge Dora
[[Page S6424]]
Irizarry. These two district court nominees have been pending on the
Senate floor longer than any of the other pending district court
nominees. Just so that there is no confusion, that is the choice of the
Republican Senate leadership to skip those nominations.
The Holmes nomination will require significant debate. It was sent by
the Judiciary Committee to the floor without recommendation, a highly
unusual circumstance. That means that there was not a majority vote in
committee to report the nomination favorably. The committee disserved
the Senate by not doing its job of fully vetting the nomination and
reaching a consensus or even a vote on the merits.
With regard to Mr. Holmes, to excuse widely shared misgivings about
this nomination partisan Republicans are falsely claiming that the
opposition to him is based on his religion. That is a slander.
Nonetheless, right wing groups like the Committee for Justice have run
outrageous and false ads and propaganda against Democrats and have
posted assertions that Democrats are anti-Catholic.
Ms. Herrera is, of course, another among the scores of judicial
nominees we have confirmed who are active in their faith. Ms. Herrera
has stated in her Senate questionnaire that she is on the Board of
Directors of the St. Michael's High School Foundation, a local Catholic
high school, and she is a parishioner at St. Francis Cathedral. It is
wrong for Republican partisans to seek political benefit by falsely
claiming that Democrats are anti-Catholic and insulting for them to
claim that Catholic Democrats are somehow not Catholic enough. Senator
Durbin just released a study this week that shows that Democrats
actually vote more often in agreement with the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops on domestic and international issues than their
counterparts across the aisle. Yet the destructive Republican politics
of division persist. These are unfortunate and dangerous schemes that
will only further divide our people and our Nation. Anna Quindlen's
recent column in Newsweek, Casting the First Stone, captures the heart
of this current tendency to mix religion and politics into a concoction
that some Republican strategists hope will help them at the ballot box.
I ask unanimous consent that this editorial be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Newsweek, May 31, 2004]
Casting the First Stone
(By Anna Quindlen)
It was nearly 25 years ago that Robert Drinan, a member of
Congress and an outspoken Jesuit (a redundancy if there ever
was one), so enraged the Vatican with his defense of abortion
rights that an order came down from Rome demanding priests
withdraw from politics.
It appears that someone has had a change of heart.
Or at least that's how it seems now that certain segments
of the Roman Catholic hierarchy are behaving like wholly
owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party, hellbent on a
course that will weaken the church's moral authority and
eventually deplete its membership. And all because of
abortion, the issue the celibate male leadership is least
equipped to personally understand.
To paraphrase a Gospel passage, my Father's house is a
house of prayer, but they have made it a den of partisanship.
The archbishop of St. Louis announced that if John Kerry, the
Democratic candidate, showed up for mass he would be denied
communion. After threats from clerics in New Jersey, the pro-
choice Democratic governor saved himself the embarrassment of
being turned away by saying he would no longer present
himself for the sacrament; the Democratic majority leader of
the state Senate responded by quitting the church and saying
he will likely join the Episcopalians. And in Colorado a
bishop went a step further, saying that any Catholic who
supports politicians who favor abortion rights, same-sex
marriage or stem-cell research should not take communion.
Surely the next step is to put ushers at the door each
Sunday with a purity checklist. Adulterer? Out. Gay? Out. Tax
cheat? Gossip? Condom in your pocket? Out. Out. Out. My, how
empty those pews have grown. And the altar, too, where we
learned that too many priests had a secret life of sexual
abuse. Why were known pedophiles permitted to give communion
for years, while people of conscience at odds with Vatican
teaching (not church dogma) are prohibited from receiving it?
It brings to mind the always topical injunction that it's he
who is without sin who gets to cast the first stone.
Too many bishops seem to have missed key seminary lessons:
the ones on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas that civil
and moral law are often two different things, or those on the
tradition in Catholic thought that a good law must be
enforceable, not a law like one prohibiting abortion that
will be so often broken that it leads to disregard for all
laws. Too many bishops seem to have forgotten the notion of
the individual examination of conscience. Instead they have
decided to examine conscience for us, particularly if we are
liberal Democrats.
Leaders of the church began a schism between pew and pulpit
in 1968 with the publication of the encyclical Humanae Vitae.
The majority of the members of a papal commission on
contraception recommended that the church change its
opposition; the minority members won out, mainly because they
based their argument on the primacy of the pope. Even then,
power politics overrode the well-being of the people.
But over time there was an unforeseen result of the
encyclical. The use of contraception became the church
prohibition millions of Catholics ignored, in part because
the directive was so out of step with modern life (as the
majority report suggested), in part because the issue was so
private. Little by little Catholics made their peace with
consulting their conscience instead of Father, especially on
intimate issues. The intermediaries became increasingly
irrelevant, especially when, in recent years, the full extent
of priestly sexual predation became known.
These member of the church were derided by conservatives as
``cafeteria Catholics,'' picking and choosing their beliefs.
Now we have cafeteria clergy, picking and choosing which
prohibitions they emphasize and which politicians they damn.
What of the pro-life policies of a living wage or decent
housing? The church is opposed to the death penalty, yet no
bishop has yet suggested he will deny the sacrament to those
who support capital punishment. And sanctions for Democratic
candidates have far outnumbered those for Republicans, even
Republicans who favor legal abortion. The timing of all this
is curious as well. It coincides with that new Catholic holy
day, the feast of the first Tuesday in November, known to
secularists as Election Day.
It is one thing to preach the teachings of the church,
quite another to use the centerpiece of the faith selectively
as a tool to influence the ballot box, that confessional of
democracy. Even a member of Congress opposed to abortion
complained that church leaders were ``politicizing the
eucharist.'' If citizens who are Methodist, Muslim or Jewish
begin to suspect that Catholic politicians are beholden first
and foremost to Rome, a notion we thought was laughable and
bigoted when John F. Kennedy ran for president, who could
blame them? Next month American Catholic bishops meet for a
retreat in Colorado. There they should speak out against
grievous sin, the sin of using communion to punish by those
who have not the moral authority to persuade.
Mr. LEAHY. I also want to focus briefly on how Republicans continue
to delay consideration of some Hispanic judicial nominees. For some
time the only Hispanic nomination of this President to the first 42
circuit court vacancies was the ill-fated nomination of a young man
whose record was kept from the Senate by the Bush administration and
who was opposed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, prominent Latino
leaders of the civil rights community and by many others. This single
nomination was in sharp contrast to the many Hispanic nominees sent to
the Senate by President Clinton. In fact, eight of the Hispanic jurists
serving on our circuit courts today were named by President Clinton,
and at least three other Clinton Hispanic circuit nominees would be
sitting on the bench now if they had not been denied consideration by a
Republican-controlled Senate.
When Democratic Senators supported the confirmation of Judge Edward
Prado, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit, the Senate Republican leadership delayed consideration
of that nomination for a month on the floor for no good reason, other
than to allow us to vote on this Hispanic nominee would undercut their
false charges that Democrats were anti-Hispanic. Judge Prado had a fair
record, years of experience as a Federal District Court judge, and
broad support from both sides of the aisle. Nonetheless, in order to
get Judge Prado a vote, I had to come before the Senate on a number of
occasions to urge his consideration because the Republican leadership
was delaying final Senate consideration of his nomination.
Now the Republican leadership seems to be returning to its earlier
ways and is again passing over Hispanic nominees without explanation.
Last October, 7 months ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee favorably
reported the nomination of Judge Dora Irizarry of New York to be a
United States District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New
York. This was not a nomination without some controversy. The
[[Page S6425]]
American Bar Association accorded her a majority rating of ``not
qualified,'' as it has several of this President's judicial nominees.
Nonetheless, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on her nomination.
The Members of the Committee examined the nomination on the merits and
reached their own judgment. With the support of Senator Schumer of New
York, the nomination was favorably reported. While Senate consideration
will include some brief debate, there is no reason this matter has not
been scheduled and considered in the last seven months. It could easily
have been considered during the course of an extended quorum call
during any one of the many days when there is no significant business
taking place on the Senate floor. As I have reiterated for months,
there is no Democratic hold on this nomination. It merits a brief
discussion, but we are prepared to vote on it. Republican delay has
prevented action on this nomination.
I do not recall this lengthy a delay in scheduling debate on a Latina
nominee since the untoward Republican obstruction of Senate
consideration of President Clinton's nomination of Judge Sonia
Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1999.
That nomination of an outstanding judge, who had been appointed to the
federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, was delayed for more than
400 days in all and waited 7 months on the Senate floor, before we were
able to force action and a vote on her confirmation. According to some
accounts, she was delayed over Republican concerns that she would be
chosen by President Clinton for the Supreme Court if a vacancy arose.
Likewise, the Senate's Republican leadership has not yet scheduled a
vote on the nomination of Ricardo S. Martinez to be a United States
District Court Judge for the Western District of Washington or Juan R.
Sanchez to be a United States District Court Judge for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania.
Despite Republican delays in the consideration of President Bush's
Hispanic nominees, the Senate has already confirmed, unanimously, three
of his Hispanic nominees to the circuit courts and 11 to the district
courts. Ms. Herrera will be the 12th Latino district court nominee and
15th overall confirmed by the Senate.
Unfortunately this White House's commitment to diversity seems
shallow when compared to its devotion to ideological purity. The
President has nominated many more members of the Federalist Society
than members of the nation's fastest growing ethnic group. The White
House has sent over the nominations of more than 45 individuals active
in the Federalist Society, which is more than twice as many Latinos as
he has nominated. In fact, the President has chosen more individuals
involved in the Federalist Society than Latinos, African Americans, and
Asian Americans combined.
We have made significant progress over the last three years in
reducing Federal judicial vacancies. As of today, there are only 43
total vacancies in the Federal court system. That stands in sharp
contrast to the treatment Republicans accorded President Clinton's
nominees. Indeed, under Republican leadership, from 1995 to the summer
of 2001 the number of vacancies in the federal courts rose from 63 to
110. We have now made up that 67 percent increase in vacancies the
Republican Senate leadership had engineered between 1995 and 2001, and
we have reduced vacancies from the 1995 level by one third, to the
lowest vacancy level in 14 years. In spite of the way more than 60 of
President Clinton's nominees were defeated by Republicans' objections,
Senate Democrats have cooperated in the consideration and confirmation
of 180 of this President's judicial nominations.
We now have 16 vacancies in the circuit courts. That is the number of
vacancies that existed when Republicans took majority control of the
Senate in 1995. Unfortunately, through Republican obstruction of
moderate nominations by President Clinton, those circuit vacancies more
than doubled, rising to 33 by the time Democrats resumed Senate
leadership in the summer of 2001. We steadily reduced circuit vacancies
over the 17 months that Senate Democrats were in charge. Even though
since 2001 an additional 15 circuit vacancies have arisen, we have done
what Republicans refused to do when President Clinton was in the White
House by not only keeping up with attrition but actually working to
reduce vacancies. We have now reduced circuit vacancies to the lowest
level since before Republican Senate leadership irresponsibly doubled
those vacancies in the years 1995 through 2001.
We should recognize the progress we have made. I certainly recognize
the entirely different approach to judicial nominations Republicans
have taken with a Republican President's nominations in contrast to
their systematic obstruction of Senate action on President Clinton's
judicial nominations. I would hope that we will be able to find ways to
work together without too much more delay to consider the Hispanic
nominees to the federal bench who Democrats are supporting.
I congratulate Ms. Herrera and her family on her confirmation today.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, Will the Senate advise and
consent to the nomination of Judith C. Herrera, of New Mexico, to be
United States District Judge for the District of New Mexico?
Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. McCONNELL. I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr.
Campbell) is necessarily absent.
Mr REID. I announce that the Senator from Montana (Mr. Baucus), the
Senator from Delaware (Mr. Biden), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr.
Corzine), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Edwards), the Senator
from Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry), and the Senator from Georgia (Mr.
Miller) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Graham of South Carolina). Are there any
other Senators in the Chamber desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 93, nays 0, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 110 Ex.]
YEAS--93
Akaka
Alexander
Allard
Allen
Bayh
Bennett
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Breaux
Brownback
Bunning
Burns
Byrd
Cantwell
Carper
Chafee
Chambliss
Clinton
Cochran
Coleman
Collins
Conrad
Cornyn
Craig
Crapo
Daschle
Dayton
DeWine
Dodd
Dole
Domenici
Dorgan
Durbin
Ensign
Enzi
Feingold
Feinstein
Fitzgerald
Frist
Graham (FL)
Graham (SC)
Grassley
Gregg
Hagel
Harkin
Hatch
Hollings
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Jeffords
Johnson
Kennedy
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lincoln
Lott
Lugar
McCain
McConnell
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (FL)
Nelson (NE)
Nickles
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Roberts
Rockefeller
Santorum
Sarbanes
Schumer
Sessions
Shelby
Smith
Snowe
Specter
Stabenow
Stevens
Sununu
Talent
Thomas
Voinovich
Warner
Wyden
NOT VOTING--7
Baucus
Biden
Campbell
Corzine
Edwards
Kerry
Miller
The nomination was confirmed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the President shall
be immediately notified of the Senate's action.
____________________