[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 42 (Tuesday, April 12, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3444-S3445]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     CONSIDERATION OF TIMELY ISSUES

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise in morning business to speak to 
several issues which I believe are timely in the consideration of the 
business of the Senate.
  We are still in this national debate relative to Social Security. 
President Bush has proposed a plan to privatize and change Social 
Security, creating the possibility of so-called personal accounts. The 
President has taken this message on the road, saying that he would 
visit 60 cities in 60 days to talk about this issue. What we found is a 
reaction across America opposed to the President's proposal.
  What we find is when the people of this country hear the details of 
President Bush's privatization plan, they are very skeptical. The 
reason is obvious. Even the President concedes that his privatization 
plan for Social Security will not strengthen Social Security. Today, 
left untouched, the Social Security Program would, for the next 36 or 
37 years at a minimum, make every payment to every retiree every year 
with a cost-of-living increase.
  If the President had his way and privatized Social Security, we have 
asked how much longer would the Social Security plan last. The answer 
is it would not only not extend the life of Social Security, it would 
shorten the life of Social Security because the President's plan is to 
reach into the Social Security trust fund to take out money that could 
be invested in the stock market. As you take money out of the trust 
fund, there is less money, obviously, to pay retirees. So the 
President's approach is going to weaken Social Security, not strengthen 
it.
  Second, the President's approach involves dramatic cuts in benefits 
for senior citizens. If you take the money out of the Social Security 
trust fund, there is less to pay. The President's White House memo that 
was leaked a few weeks ago discloses that they would change the index 
by which people are paid Social Security benefits. That index decides 
what increase will come each year in Social Security. The President 
would reduce that index, so you would find in 10 or 20 years that 
retirees in America would get 40 percent less when it comes to their 
Social Security benefits. That would drive many seniors, who have paid 
into Social Security for a lifetime, into a position where they would 
be below the poverty line. So the second aspect of President Bush's 
privatization plan is not only that it does not strengthen Social 
Security, but there are dramatic benefit cuts to those who have paid a 
lifetime into Social Security, driving more seniors into poverty, 
making them vulnerable to a life that is much different than they had 
anticipated as they went to work every day and paid into Social 
Security.

  The final point is one of the more important ones as well. President 
Bush's privatization of Social Security is going to add dramatically to 
America's national debt. In fact, the estimates from the President's 
own agencies say that this plan of his to privatize will add $2 
trillion to $5 trillion to the national debt. That is a dramatic 
increase in the mortgage of America that our children will have to pay 
off. Who will hold the mortgage of America? Right now, the people 
holding the mortgage happen to be Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, OPEC. So 
we will find ourselves more in debt to those who are financing 
America's national deficit, and our children will have to pay them off. 
We will have to dance to their tune. If they lose confidence in the 
American dollar, we will have to raise interest rates in order to 
entice them to buy our debt. Raising interest rates to lure China and 
Japan onto our side means raising interest rates at home.
  So President Bush's privatization plan on Social Security has run 
into a firestorm of criticism. It is a plan which does not strengthen 
Social Security; it threatens massive benefit cuts and adds 
dramatically to our national debt.
  I see my colleague from Delaware is on the floor, so I will speak 
very briefly.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article from 
the Washington Post of April 9.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Apr. 9, 2005]

             And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

                           (By Dana Milbank)

       Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly 
     accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good 
     lawyer--and perhaps a few more bodyguards.
       Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a 
     discussion of ``Remedies to Judicial Tyranny'' decided that 
     Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or 
     worse.
       Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said 
     Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles 
     ``is a good ground of impeachment.'' To cheers and applause 
     from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference 
     on ``Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,'' Schlafly said 
     that Kennedy had not met the ``good behavior'' requirement 
     for office and that ``Congress ought to talk about 
     impeachment.''
       Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal 
     Defense Association, said Kennedy ``should be the poster boy 
     for impeachment'' for citing international norms in his 
     opinions. ``If our congressmen and senators do not have the 
     courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, 
     they ought to be impeached as well.''
       Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the 
     gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his 
     philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-
     sodomy statute, ``upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic 
     principles drawn from foreign law.''
       Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his ``bottom line'' 
     for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. 
     ``He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever 
     he ran into difficulty: `no man, no problem,' '' Vieira said.
       The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is 
     ``Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.'' 
     Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than 
     Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But 
     then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge 
     furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, 
     but it also has the potential to turn ugly.
       A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in 
     Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts 
     spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri 
     Schiavo case, House Majority leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.) 
     said that ``the time will come for the men responsible for 
     this to answer for their behavior.'' Sen. John Cornyn (R-
     Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making 
     political decisions could lead people to ``engage in 
     violence.''
       ``The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom 
     DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,'' Schlafly 
     said to applause yesterday. One worker at the event wore a 
     sticker declaring ``Hooray for DeLay.''
       The conference was organized during the height of the 
     Schiavo controversy by a new group, the Judeo-Christian 
     Council for Constitutional Restoration. This was no 
     collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed 
     two House members; aides to two senators; representatives 
     from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for 
     America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. 
     Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's 
     ``Ten Commandments'' judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who 
     canceled to attend the pope's funeral.
       The Schlafly session's moderator, Richard Lessner of the 
     American Conservative Union, opened the discussion by 
     decrying a ``radical secularist relativist judiciary.'' It 
     turned more harsh from there.
       Schlafly called for passage of a quartet of bills in 
     Congress that would remove courts' power to review religious 
     displays, the Pledge of Allegiance, same-sex marriage and the 
     Boy Scouts. Her speech brought a subtle change in the 
     argument against the courts from emphasizing ``activist'' 
     judges--it was, after all, inaction by federal judges that 
     doomed Schiavo--to ``supremacist'' judges. ``The Constitution 
     is not what the Supreme Court says it is,'' Schlafly 
     asserted.

[[Page S3445]]

       Former representative William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) 
     followed Schlafly, saying the country's ``principal problem'' 
     is not Iraq or the federal budget but whether ``we as a 
     people acknowledge that God exists.''
       Farris then told the crowd he is ``sick and tired of having 
     to lobby people I helped get elected.'' A better-educated 
     citizenry, he said, would know that ``Medicare is a bad 
     idea'' and that ``Social Security is a horrible idea when run 
     by the government.'' Farris said he would block judicial 
     power by abolishing the concept of binding judicial 
     precedents, by allowing Congress to vacate court decisions, 
     and by impeaching judges such as Kennedy, who seems to have 
     replaced Justice David H. Souter as the target of 
     conservative ire. ``If about 40 of them get impeached, 
     suddenly a lot of these guys would be retiring,'' he said.
       Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote ``How to Dethrone 
     the Imperial Judiciary,'' escalated the charges, saying a 
     Politburo of ``five people on the Supreme Court'' has a 
     ``revolutionary agenda'' rooted in foreign law and 
     situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his 
     head with black elastic, decried the ``primordial illogic'' 
     of the courts. '
       Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the ``no man, no 
     problem'' line twice for emphasis. ``This is not a structural 
     problem we have; this is a problem of personnel,'' he said. 
     ``We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as 
     judges.''
       A court spokeswoman declined to comment.

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, if you want to know the extremes which are 
being reached in the debate on the role of judges in America, read this 
article. There was a meeting in Washington, DC, of some of the more 
conservative groups on the Republican side. These conservative leaders 
met to discuss ``Remedies to Judicial Tyranny.''
  They decided that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy--a Ronald 
Reagan appointee, I might add--should be impeached.

       Phyllis Schlafly [originally from my home State of 
     Illinois] said [that Justice] Kennedy's opinion forbidding 
     capital punishment for juveniles ``is a good ground of 
     impeachment.'' To cheers and applause from those gathered at 
     a downtown Marriott for a conference on ``Confronting the 
     Judicial War on Faith,'' Schlafly said that Kennedy had not 
     met the ``good behavior'' requirement for office and that 
     ``Congress ought to talk about impeachment.''

  Unfortunately, hers was not the most incendiary quote. A gentleman by 
the name of Edwin Vieira, a lawyer-author, the article goes on to say:

     . . . not to be outdone . . . told the gathering that Justice 
     Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced 
     in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 
     ``upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from 
     foreign law.''
       Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his ``bottom line'' 
     for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin.

  I am quoting Mr. Vieira:

       He [Stalin] had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, 
     whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,''' 
     Vieira said.

  The Washing Post goes on to say:

       The full Stalin quote [this is what Stalin really said] . . 
     . is ``Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.''

  This type of outrageous statement from the so-called conservative 
Republican right is clear evidence that what we have heard from 
Congressman Tom DeLay in the House of Representatives, and from even 
Members in our own Chamber, represents a departure from the line of 
civility which we have refused to assault or cross when it comes to 
dealing with the separate branches of Government.
  There is no doubt that decisions are handed down by Federal courts 
across America on a daily basis with which I personally disagree and 
find abhorrent. But to suggest retribution against judges--first from 
Schlafly that it should involve impeachment and then from Mr. Vieira 
that it should go further--suggests an assault on the independence of 
the judiciary about which every American should be concerned. When the 
men and women who don these robes for lifetime appointments have the 
courage to rule in cases, even in controversial cases, they should not 
feel they are going to be threatened on a regular basis by Members of 
Congress or by those in political parties who happen to see things 
differently.
  We know how this can reach an extreme. We have seen it happen. In my 
home State of Illinois, the family of one of our outstanding Federal 
jurists was assaulted, and two of them were murdered. This type of 
reaction shows that when you give comfort to this crazed mindset, it 
can have disastrous results. The people who sponsored this conference 
should be embarrassed that they came together and suggested this kind 
of action against Federal judges.
  It is time to put an end to this. We need to have an independent 
judiciary in touch with the ordinary lives of American citizens, in 
touch with the value of our families. But we always should stand and 
defend the independence of our judiciary and the integrity of the men 
and women who serve in that branch.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Delaware is 
recognized.

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