[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 86 (Wednesday, May 22, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3042-S3043]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO JOHN PAUL STEVENS

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, it has been nearly a decade since Justice 
John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court. His absence on the 
bench is perhaps felt more now than ever. Justice Stevens' nomination 
was the first of 18 Supreme Court nominees I have considered in my 
years in the Senate. As a young Senator, it was a privilege to support 
his confirmation in 1975. It was a vote I have long been proud of. 
Justice Stevens had a storied tenure on the Supreme Court and 
ultimately became the third longest serving Justice in our Nation's 
history.
  Justice Stevens' commitment to the law and conduct on the bench was 
beyond reproach. His legacy is one of integrity, dedication to public 
service, and a recognition that the Constitution protects all Americans 
equally. He was part of majorities that protected LGBT rights, 
disability rights, and limited the death penalty.
  The Supreme Court has never been perfect. Justice Stevens would be 
the first to acknowledge as much, but I cannot help but compare his 
many years on the Court with today. Today, the Supreme Court almost 
reflexively sides with corporate interests over individuals' interests, 
even when precedent or so-called textualism and originalism stand in 
the way. We have also seen an unprecedented blockade of a Supreme Court 
nominee, and we have a President intent on nominating the most 
ideological nominees to the bench I have ever seen, nominees who have 
been preapproved by opaque far-right special interest groups. Many of 
these nominees have long records of outright hostility toward 
reproductive rights, environmental protections, and voting and civil 
rights. They even refuse to accept that Brown v. Board of Education, a 
foundational civil rights decision settled 65 years ago, is indeed 
settled law. It is equally predictable and deeply unfortunate that 
Americans increasingly view the courts as a purely political 
institution.
  Our Constitution and laws are intended to serve the people, 
protecting the freedom of individuals from the tyranny of government 
and helping to organize our society for the good of all. It is up to 
the judiciary to ensure our laws have meaning. This is a duty Justice 
Stevens' recognized and relished.
  How I miss his jurisprudence, his steady voice, and his leadership.
  I ask unanimous consent that a May 11, 2019, feature by Robert Barnes 
from The Washington Post entitled, ``John Paul Stevens looks back on 
nearly a century of life and law, but worries about the future,'' be 
included in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, May 11, 2019]

 John Paul Stevens Looks Back on Nearly a Century of Life and Law, But 
                        Worries About the Future

                           (By Robert Barnes)

       Fort Lauderdale, FL.--John Paul Stevens spent more than a 
     third of his near-century on Earth at the Supreme Court, 
     where he often was on a different page from a majority of his 
     fellow justices.
       ``It happens so often that you have to get used to 
     losing,'' Stevens, 99, said during an interview this last 
     week at his condominium here, just steps from the Atlantic 
     Ocean. ``My batting average was probably pretty low.''

[[Page S3043]]

       But one particular loss lingers and, Stevens says, brings 
     grim reminders almost weekly: the court's 2008 decision in 
     District of Columbia v. Heller, which found the Second 
     Amendment protects a right to individual gun ownership 
     unrelated to possible military service.
       ``Unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that 
     the Court announced during my tenure on the bench,'' Stevens 
     writes in his new memoir, ``The Making of a Justice.''
       Heller and the Second Amendment, Stevens said in the 
     interview, produce ``such disastrous practical effects. I 
     think there's no need for all the guns we have in the country 
     and if I could get rid of one thing it would be to get rid of 
     that whole gun climate.''
       He continued: ``Just the other day there was another school 
     shooting in Colorado, and every time it happens, it seems to 
     me we don't have to have this kind of thing in this country, 
     and we should do everything we can to try to change it.''
       Stevens writes of his efforts to try to make the 5-to-4 
     decision come out the other way. His 531-page book, to be 
     published Tuesday, details the life and career of a World War 
     II Navy code-breaker from a solidly Republican family, 
     nominated to the federal bench by one GOP president (Richard 
     M. Nixon) and elevated to the Supreme Court by another 
     (Gerald R. Ford) who retired in 2010 as the court's most 
     outspoken liberal. Although, Stevens believes the court 
     changed more than he did.
       In the interview, he expressed generalized distress at the 
     state of the world and the nation's politics. ``You wake up 
     in the morning and you wonder what's happened,'' he said. 
     Still, he retains a judge's reticence even years after 
     leaving the bench: ``But I shouldn't say more.''
       He does wonder why it is so challenging for his former 
     colleagues to recognize that partisan gerrymandering is a 
     constitutional violation, as they do with racial 
     gerrymandering. ``It's the same issue,'' he said. ``Public 
     officials, including state legislators, have a duty to act 
     impartially. The whole point [of partisan gerrymandering] is 
     to create an unfair result.''
       And he expressed surprise about Chief Justice John G. 
     Roberts Jr., whom he respects and admires. ``I must confess 
     he's more conservative than I realized,'' Stevens said. ``But 
     that doesn't go to his quality as a chief justice.''
       During the interview, Stevens was preparing for a reunion 
     of his clerks--more than 90 of 125 were expected to attend. 
     He must steady himself with a walker, but he remains active. 
     Tennis has been replaced by ping-pong, he said, but he still 
     plays nine holes of golf each week.
       ``I don't go in the ocean as much as I used to, and that's 
     really my favorite activity down here,'' he said. ``A strong 
     guy'' to help him in and out of the surf is now ``an absolute 
     necessity,'' he said.
       It is hard to imagine that at his 1975 confirmation 
     hearing, soon after he became one of the first to receive a 
     heart bypass operation, the main obstacle was ``did I have a 
     sufficient life expectancy to justify the important 
     appointment,'' he writes. He was approved unanimously. The 
     memoir is a tale of a privileged childhood in Chicago, the 
     ravages of the Great Depression and a family scandal, service 
     as a wartime cryptologist and a charmed legal career as a 
     Supreme Court clerk, appeals court judge and the third-
     longest-serving justice in the court's history.
       Stevens was in the stands at Wrigley Field in Chicago when 
     Babe Ruth called his shot in the 1932 World Series--``my most 
     important claim to fame,'' he writes--and in the audience at 
     the Democratic National Convention that summer when Franklin 
     D. Roosevelt explained the New Deal on his way to becoming 
     president. His father, Ernest, who took Stevens to the 
     speech, was a Warren Harding Republican, however.
       Amelia Earhart told him he was out too late for a school 
     night when she attended the grand opening of the Stevens 
     Hotel in Chicago, at the time the largest in the world. 
     Charles Lindbergh passed along a caged dove someone had given 
     him. On a trip to the South, Stevens and his family attended 
     ``Gone With The Wind'' the week it in opened in Atlanta.
       The invitations that come to a Supreme Court justice 
     provide other celebrity tidbits. He was as smitten as others 
     when he met Princess Diana, and an encounter with the 
     composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein provides a 
     surprisingly bawdy anecdote from the mannerly Stevens, who 
     often prefaced his questions on the bench with a courtly, 
     ``May I just ask . . . ?''
       It was during a dinner at the French Embassy in Washington 
     when Stevens and his wife, Maryan, were seated with 
     Bernstein, who had just conducted the Orchestre National de 
     France at the Kennedy Center. Maryan wondered about the 
     emotions that accompany performing a masterpiece.
       ``It's like [making love] in a cathedral,'' Bernstein 
     replied, according to Stevens in the memoir. The justice 
     dutifully used the f-word to authenticate his reporting.
       ``The Making of a Justice'' is Stevens's third book since 
     leaving the court; the others chronicle the chief justices 
     with whom he served and how he would remake the Constitution. 
     He said he is unsure if there is a lesson in it for readers. 
     ``I didn't have a specific mission in mind, I just started to 
     write,'' he said.
       One lesson from childhood that informed his career, though, 
     involved his father. The Depression hit after the Stevens 
     Hotel opened, and the place faltered. The hotel borrowed 
     money from an insurance company controlled by Stevens's 
     grandfather, an act that a Cook County prosecutor viewed as 
     embezzlement. Ernest Stevens was found guilty, only to have 
     his conviction overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court, 
     which found not a ``scintilla'' of evidence of criminal 
     intent.
       ``Firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice's 
     fallibility'' made Stevens skeptical for the rest of his 
     career, he said. ``The system is not perfect--it's pretty 
     good, but it's not perfect''
       Stevens was part of majorities that handed important 
     victories to gays, limited the death penalty and mostly held 
     the line on abortion rights.
       On the latter, he said he is puzzled by ``more and more 
     state legislatures'' passing restrictive laws in hopes of 
     getting the Supreme Court to revisit the court's rulings.
       ``I thought that was an issue that had been resolved,'' he 
     said. ``I have no idea what the present court will do.''
       In the book, he detailed his efforts to derail the Heller 
     majority. He adopted Justice Antonin Scalia's originalist 
     approach to show, in his opinion, that historical texts 
     supported the view that the Second Amendment was aimed at 
     preventing federal disarmament of state militias, rather than 
     forbidding efforts at gun control.
       He wrote that he circulated his dissent five weeks before 
     Scalia's majority opinion, in hopes of persuading Justice 
     Anthony M. Kennedy and--somewhat surprisingly--Justice 
     Clarence Thomas.
       ``I think he's an intellectually honest person, and I just 
     thought there was a chance he might be persuaded'' on the 
     historical arguments, Stevens said of Thomas. ``I guess I was 
     kind of dreaming a little bit.''
       But Stevens said the effort did succeed in getting Kennedy 
     to insist Scalia include limiting language that states and 
     cities have used to defend their gun-control measures.
       In the book, Stevens refers to U.S. v. Nixon, in which the 
     court said the president must turn over White House tapes to 
     congressional investigators, as ``the high point for judicial 
     independence.''
       He wrote the court's unanimous decision in Clinton v. 
     Jones, saying that a sitting president does not have immunity 
     from all civil lawsuits for actions when he was not in 
     office.
       Both were unanimous and ``easy decisions,'' Stevens said, 
     but he declined to be drawn into the current battle between 
     congressional investigators and President Trump.
       He is asked: Nothing to say about the president? ``Nothing 
     that you don't know already,'' he said.

                          ____________________