[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 49 (Thursday, April 21, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4076-S4078]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             NUCLEAR OPTION

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will speak about the second issue I would 
like to talk about.
  The Republican nuclear option has been discussed endlessly on 
editorial pages, talk radio, and here in this Chamber. The ongoing 
debate is about much more than Senate procedure. At its core is a 
debate, really, about where we are headed in our relationship between 
each other, Republicans and Democrats, leaders all sworn to uphold the 
Constitution and with the responsibility to try to lead this Nation in 
difficult times and find the common ground and build a consensus for 
our country.
  At its core is a debate about how we live out our own democracy in 
America. Beneath it are questions about how this city, the Nation's 
Capital, is functioning today, how we relate to each other, how our 
committees work, how the Senate itself functions. It appears as if we 
are headed in a direction that ultimately clashes with the real will 
and needs of the American people. That is what this is really all 
about.
  The fact that we are even talking about this nuclear option is a 
stark reminder that Washington is not caught up fighting for the 
broader interests of the American people, that we are not spending most 
of our time consumed by the things that affect the lives of average 
Americans--losing their jobs, seeing more expensive health care, 
watching jobs go overseas, seeing the deficit grow, seeing the trade 
deficit grow, wondering about the health care system of our Nation, 
schools where our kids still have teachers who dig into their pockets 
in order to take out of their not-so-great salaries to put materials in 
front of those kids so they can study--while we here make other 
choices.
  From the outside looking in, our democracy appears broken to an awful 
lot of Americans. It certainly seems to be endangered by a one-party 
rule--not a supermajority, a simple majority--in a very closely divided 
Nation, a party rule that seems intent on amassing power to be able to 
effect its will no matter what, often at the expense of the real work 
and the real needs of the American people.
  Now, in recent weeks alone, we have witnessed a really disturbing 
course of events, probably as disturbing as I have seen in the 22 years 
I have been privileged to serve here. Republican leaders of Congress, 
in my judgment--I say this respectfully--are crossing lines I think 
should not be crossed: the line that says a leader of the House of 
Representatives should never carelessly threaten or intimidate Federal 
judges; the line that says the leader of the Senate should never accuse 
those who disagree with his political tactics of waging a war against 
people of faith; the line that says respect for core constitutional 
principles should never be undermined by a political party's agenda; 
most important of all, the line that

[[Page S4077]]

says that a political party's leader should never let the hunger to get 
done whatever that political agenda is overshadow the needs and the 
interests of respecting both the Constitution and the will of the 
American people.
  It is, frankly, almost hard to believe that in a Congress where 
leaders of both parties once worked together to find common ground 
despite ideological differences, we face this. If Everett Dirksen were 
here, or Hugh Scott, people I was privileged to meet as a younger 
American when I was looking at the system, I think they would shudder 
at this relationship we see today.
  Yesterday, when Jim Jeffords announced his retirement, I remembered 
the very different words about a different Washington that Jim captured 
so eloquently about 4 years ago. He spoke of a political tradition 
where leaders represented their States first. They spoke their minds, 
he said, often to the dismay of their party leaders. And they did their 
best to guide this city in the direction of our fundamental principles.
  It is underscored by what happened in the Foreign Relations Committee 
just the other day. Our distinguished colleague, Senator Voinovich, had 
the courage to think. He had the courage to tap into his own conscience 
and to respect that tradition of thought and individualism in the 
Senate. But it was astonishing the reaction of the press, the reaction 
of the commentators, the reaction of partisans, the reaction of members 
of his own party, who underscored how rare, how absolutely out of order 
and how out of the sequence it was for this Senator to individualize 
his judgment, all of a sudden.

  Senator Voinovich is now being vilified on talk radio and on the 
Internet for having the audacity to say that he felt uncomfortable 
casting a vote without enough information. He did not say he planned to 
vote against the President's nominee; he said he just wants to make an 
informed decision on the matter, a matter of great importance. That 
does not seem very controversial to me. But, oh, boy, are the attack 
folks out. The daggers are out. Senator Voinovich is persona non grata 
among certain circles.
  Senator Chafee actually said he had never seen such an act as Senator 
Voinovich's in his 4 years in Washington. What a terrible comment on 
the way this place works today, that a new Senator has not seen an act 
of individual conscience where a Senator thinks something through and 
realizes he is not prepared and wants more information. Before the era 
of C-SPAN and 24-hour news and 24-hour attack and the World Wide Web, 
Senators showed the courage and the independence all the time. Senators 
did not think twice about acting on their conscience ahead of 
partisanship. And today, it is a statement that Senator Voinovich is 
subject to widespread denigration in partisan circles, when Americans 
ought to be standing up and admiring and respecting his independence.
  Open your eyes across this country and look at what is happening in 
the Congress today, and you are quickly reminded that some of those who 
run this city have chosen to do so in a way that does not seek to find 
that common ground, that does not try to stay in touch with the 
mainstream values but pushes a narrower set of priorities.
  What does it tell you when an embattled majority leader of the House 
is willing to go on talk radio and attack a Supreme Court Justice, let 
alone a Supreme Court Justice appointed by Ronald Reagan, confirmed by 
a nearly unanimous Senate, a Justice who ruled in favor of President 
Bush in Bush v. Gore? Ronald Reagan's nominee to the highest court in 
the land cannot even escape Tom DeLay's partisan assaults. Yet here on 
the floor of the Senate there is no outcry, no moderating Republican 
voice willing to say this shocking attack has no place in our 
democracy.
  I guess none of this should be a surprise when the majority leader 
announces what he is going to do on this Sunday. The majority leader 
plans to headline a religious service devoted to defeating, and I 
quote, ``a filibuster against people of faith.''
  Mr. President, I resent that. I am a person of faith, and I do not 
believe we should lose our right to have a filibuster to stop things 
that we disagree with, according to the rules of the Senate. It has 
nothing to do with faith. And when the leader of the Senate questions 
how any Senator applies their faith in opposing procedures of the 
Senate, we are going too far. You go beyond endangering the rules that 
protect the cherished rights of the majority and the minority; you wind 
up challenging the foundation of our democracy and of how this Senate 
is supposed to work.
  Make no mistake, this may be an isolated issue, but the rights of the 
minority are fundamental to our democracy. Many people have written 
that the real sign of a democracy is not the rights of the majority. It 
is the rights of the minority that are, in fact, a signal of a truly 
strong and vibrant democracy, and diluting those rights is a threat to 
that vibrancy.
  Forces outside the mainstream now seem to effortlessly push 
Republican leaders toward conduct that the American people do not want 
in their elected leaders--inserting the Government into our private 
lives, injecting religion into debates about public policy when it does 
not apply, jumping through hoops to ingratiate themselves to their 
party's base--while, step by step and day by day, real problems that 
keep Americans up at night fall by the wayside here in Washington.
  We each have to ask ourselves, Who is going to stop it? Who is going 
to stand up and say: Are we really going to allow this to continue? Are 
Republicans in the House going to continue spending the people's time 
defending Tom DeLay, or are they going to defend America and defend our 
democracy?
  Will Republican Senators let their silence endorse Senator Frist's 
appeal to religious division, or will they put principle ahead of 
partisanship and refuse to follow him across that line? Will they join 
in an effort across the aisle to heal the wounds of this institution 
and begin addressing the countless challenges that face this Nation? It 
is time to come together to fulfill our fundamental obligations to our 
soldiers, our military families who have sacrificed so much. It is time 
to bring down gas prices and to move America toward less dependence on 
foreign oil. It is time to find common ground to cover the 11 million 
children in this country who have no health insurance at all. Are we 
willing to allow Washington to become a place where we can rewrite the 
ethics rules to protect Tom DeLay but sell out the ethics of the 
American people by refusing to rewrite a law to provide health care to 
every child in the country? Are we willing to allow the Senate to fall 
in line with the majority leader when he invokes faith, all of our 
faiths over here? Joe Lieberman is a person of faith. Harry Reid is a 
person of faith. They don't believe we should rewrite the rules of the 
Senate. And we certainly should not allow this to be an issue of people 
who believe in the Constitution somehow challenging the faith of others 
in our Nation.
  Are we going to allow the majority leader to invoke faith to rewrite 
Senate rules to put substandard extremist judges on the bench? Is that 
where we are now? It is not up to us to tell any one of our colleagues 
what to believe as a matter of faith.
  I can tell you what I do believe though. When you have tens of 
thousands of innocent souls perished in Darfur, when 11 million 
children are without health insurance, when our colossal debt subjects 
our economic future to the whims of Asian bankers, no one can tell me 
that faith demands all of a sudden that you put the Senate in a 
position where it is going to pull itself apart over the question of a 
few judges. No one with those priorities has a right to use faith to 
intimidate any one of us.
  It is time we made it clear that we are not willing to lie down and 
put this narrow, stubborn agenda ahead of our families, ahead of our 
Constitution, and ahead of our values. The elected leadership in 
Washington owes the American people and this institution better than 
this.
  What is at stake is far more than the loss of civility or the 
sacrifice of bipartisanship. What is at stake is our values, both as a 
country and an institution, respecting the rights of the minority, 
separation of church and state, honesty and responsibility.
  Every one of us knows there is no real crisis in the confirmation of

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judges or judicial nominations, when over 90 percent of the President's 
nominees have already been confirmed, 205 out of 215 total. What is 
really at stake is something a lot greater, a struggle between a great 
political tradition in the United States that seeks common ground so we 
can do the common good, and a new ethic that on any given issue is 
prepared to use any means to justify the end of absolute victory over 
whatever and whoever stands in the way of that ethic; a new view that 
says if you don't like the facts, just change them; if you can't win 
playing by the rules, just rewrite them; a new view that says if you 
can't win a debate on the strength of your argument, demonize your 
opponents; a new view that says it is OK to ignore the overwhelming 
public interest as long as you can get away with it. For what? For a 
so-called nuclear option over a few judges, an option that seeks to put 
extreme, substandard judges on the bench against the will of the 
American people.
  Is it worth undermining our democracy on behalf of Priscilla Owens, 
who took contributions from Enron and Halliburton and then ruled in 
their favor? A conflict? Is it worth this distraction from the people's 
business to confirm a Charles Pickering who fought against implementing 
the Voting Rights Act and manipulated the judicial system to reduce the 
sentence of a convicted cross burner? Is it worth throwing out 200 
years of Senate tradition to defend William Myers, Janice Rogers Brown, 
and Bill Pryor whom numerous members of the impartial American Bar 
Association deemed unqualified?
  The fact that we even have to debate a nuclear option over these 
judges tells you this is all about power, about victory, about a sort 
of unchallenged ability to be able to do whatever you want, despite the 
fact that that is not the way it works here and that is not the way our 
Founding Fathers intended it to work.
  It is time to put Americans back in control of their own lives and 
put Washington back on their side. That means restoring accountability, 
accountability for false promises, accountability for failure to 
address issues that we have promised to address, ranging from energy 
independence to military families who just lose their benefits when 
they are called to duty and struggle with their families, 
accountability for fiscal insanity, for record deficits, for mounting 
debts. That is the debate we owe the American people, accountability 
for 45 million Americans who have no health care and middle-class 
Americans who are one doctor's bill away from bankruptcy, especially 
the 11 million children who have no health care at all. That is what 
the American people want us to debate with passion, not the rules of 
the Senate but the legitimacy and the substance of those choices. That 
is what we ought to do.
  Any Senator who has been here for a period of time has watched the 
decline of the quality of the exchange between both sides of the aisle 
in this institution. That is not what this Senate is renown for. It is 
called the greatest deliberative body in the world, a place where 
people on both sides can find the common ground and get good things 
done.
  I think Senator McCain has said publicly: We are not always going to 
be in the majority.
  That has been the course of history here. What goes around comes 
around. That is part of the respect that has always guided this 
institution. We need to work harder, all of us, to restore what the 
American people want and haven't had for too long. That is a Washington 
that works for them.
  I yield the floor.

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