[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 79 (Tuesday, May 15, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Page S2658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



             Nominations of Andrew Oldham and Wendy Vitter

  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, the Judiciary Committee announced that 
it would be voting on a slate of judicial nominees including Andrew 
Oldham, a nominee for the Fifth Circuit, and Wendy Vitter, a nominee 
for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
  We prize the quality of moderation in all our judges at the district 
level, the circuit level, and, of course, at the Supreme Court level. 
Mr. Oldham and Ms. Vitter unfortunately have expressed a number of 
sentiments that would put them on the political extreme, including 
troubling statements about women's healthcare rights.
  Asked separately by my colleague, Senator Blumenthal, if they agreed 
with the decision in the landmark Supreme Court decision forbidding 
segregating schools in Brown v. Board of Education, both Mr. Oldham and 
Ms. Vitter demurred. Can you believe that? They would not say they 
supported Brown v. Board of Education, and this is who our colleagues 
are nominating to put on the bench? It shouldn't be a tough question. 
Segregation and the false paradigm of ``separate but equal'' was a 
national disgrace. It remains a stain on our history. It has been 
widely discredited from one end of America to the other. Yet the 
nominees for the Fifth Circuit and the Eastern District of Louisiana 
could not say they agreed with the idea that we as a Nation should have 
one school system for all races.
  The Judiciary Committee will vote on Mr. Oldham and Ms. Vitter's 
nominations on Thursday, 64 years to the day since Brown v. Board was 
decided and segregated schools were deemed unconstitutional. In honor 
of this anniversary, the 64th anniversary of Brown v. Board, my Senate 
Republican colleagues aren't rolling out a new education policy or a 
new civil rights policy, they are voting to give these two individuals 
lifetime appointments to the bench.
  When we say that sometimes our Republican colleagues and this 
President is divisive, it is actions like this that document that and 
make the fact that they are being divisive irrefutable. Our Nation 
became a better nation--more just, more free--when the Supreme Court 
said that no official, high or petty, could determine where an African 
American child could or could not go to school. If you can't agree with 
that decision, you don't deserve to be a Federal judge, and my 
colleagues should make a stand and roundly vote against these two 
nominees.