[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 193 (Wednesday, December 4, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6835-S6836]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Nomination of David B. Barlow

  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss my 
friend, my former colleague, and soon-to-be confirmed Federal District 
Judge David Barlow.
  Last night, the Senate voted to invoke cloture as to Mr. Barlow's 
nomination. We will be voting later today to confirm him. Based on the 
support we have, I expect the vote to be overwhelming, and with really 
good reason.
  David Barlow is someone I have known for a long time. He is someone I 
have known, in fact, for more than 30 years.
  David Barlow and I first met when we were both in high school. Oddly 
enough, we met in Washington, DC, while we were both participating in 
an event known as American Legion Boys Nation. We had both attended 
Boys State in our respective States--I in Utah and he in Idaho--and we 
were both selected to go to Boys Nation to represent our respective 
Boys States.
  Shortly after we convened as Boys Nation senators, David Barlow was 
elected to be the President pro temp of the Boys Nation senate. As a 
result, when we visited the White House a few days later, it was David 
Barlow who got to stand right next to Ronald Reagan as he greeted us in 
the Rose Garden and addressed Boys Nation.
  David Barlow was someone who seemed to have been born for public 
service, and he was born for public service for all of the right 
reasons, in all of the right ways. He had a certain enthusiasm about 
the workings of government--not in a partisan way, not in a self-
interested way but in a way that was infectious and made all around him 
want to build a better country, want to find common ground, and want to 
come to know more about our country's rich histories and tradition.
  Mr. Barlow and I became reacquainted about a year after we first met, 
when we first enrolled as freshmen students at Brigham Young University 
in the fall of 1989. David Barlow was there on a full academic 
scholarship and did not disappoint with his academic performance. As I 
recall, he graduated with a 4.0 grade point average from Brigham Young 
University with highest honors. Here again, David was smart but in a 
way that didn't make other people feel less smart. He made other people 
feel smart and eager to learn more, eager to be more enthusiastic about 
the academic process. He isn't someone who would have ever talked to 
other people about his outstanding grades or about his wonderful 
accomplishments.
  A few years later, we both graduated from BYU. He graduated in 1995 
from Brigham Young University and enrolled at Yale Law School, where he 
received his jurist doctorate degree in 1998.
  After he graduated, David Barlow started his legal career as an 
associate at the law firm then known as Lord, Bissell & Brook in the 
firm's Chicago office. Just a couple of years later, David joined 
Sidley and Austin LLP as an associate in the firm's Chicago office. He 
later became a partner starting, I believe, in 2006, and he remained a 
partner at Sidley up until 2010.
  During much of that time, I was an associate at Sidley and Austin in 
the firm's Washington, DC, office. I got to know David again through 
this process, this time as a lawyer, as a professional. Although we 
worked in different offices, as part of the same firm, we knew the same 
people.
  The network of lawyers with whom I worked quickly identified David 
Barlow as one of the lawyers in the firm who could be trusted with 
everything, one of the lawyers in the firm who, even as a young 
associate, could be given any task, and any lawyer giving him that 
responsibility could do so with the full assurance that the client 
would be well served, that no ball would be dropped, and that every 
stone would be turned over in an effort to properly handle the case.
  Mr. Barlow worked on a wide variety of litigation matters, including 
complex civil litigation, class actions, and products liability cases. 
He also handled a number of domestic violence cases on a pro bono 
basis.
  Among many of his clients, David Barlow became known as Dr. Barlow. 
It was a name assigned to him by some of his clients when he was 
working on some liability cases involving the medical field. He became 
so immersed in the subject matter of the litigation

[[Page S6836]]

that over time he acquired more knowledge in some cases than some of 
the doctors who were consulting with the client on that same matter. To 
this day, I occasionally refer to him as Dr. Barlow just for fun.
  In 2011, shortly after I had been elected to the U.S. Senate, David 
Barlow joined my team as my chief counsel and chief staffer on the 
Judiciary Committee. He is someone who had never worked in the U.S. 
Senate prior to that time but, literally, within a matter of weeks, had 
learned the ropes of this body to a degree sufficient that no one would 
have been able to discern the difference between Mr. Barlow and 
somebody who had worked in the Senate for many, many years.
  He quickly became a favorite within my office. David Barlow was 
someone who we could always turn to in a moment if someone had a 
question. In a moment of crisis, he would figure out how to solve it. 
In a moment where we needed an answer to a legal question, he either 
knew the answer or, if he didn't know the answer, he could find it in a 
short period of time, and we could proceed with the correct 
understanding that, when he gave us an answer, it was right and we 
could rely on it.
  The fact that he was so beloved within my office extended far beyond 
his legal acumen or his professional abilities. He is also just a 
delight to be around. He is really funny, and he is equally conversive 
in a wide variety of material, from Shakespeare to Chaucer, from the 
Old Testament to old episodes of ``30 Rock'' and Saturday Night Live.'' 
He had a sophisticated sense of humor that managed to be outrageously 
funny, while never inappropriate. That is a skill that we in Utah 
particularly strive to attain and very few are able to achieve.
  Later in 2011, President Obama chose David Barlow to serve as the 
U.S. attorney for the District of Utah. This was a bittersweet moment 
for me and my staff, having learned to rely on his skill, but we were 
very happy for David and especially happy for the people of Utah, who 
were the beneficiaries of his outstanding service as the U.S. 
attorney. Having previously worked in that U.S. Attorney's Office 
myself as an assistant U.S. attorney, I stayed in contact with many of 
my former colleagues, all of whom came to absolutely love this 
outstanding public servant.

  David served as U.S. attorney through 2014, at which point he 
returned to his partnership at Sidley Austin and worked in the firm's 
Washington, DC, office. In 2017, he joined Walmart as vice president 
over compliance for the company's health and wellness business. I still 
remember the moment when someone reviewing him for that position, prior 
to the time he had been offered the job, called to ask me what I 
thought about his qualifications for that job. I explained at the 
outset to this reviewer that my comments regarding David Barlow would 
be so overwhelmingly positive that she would think I was joking. I was, 
in fact, not.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to deliver my remarks to an 
extent not to exceed 4 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, needless to say, he got the job. He 
flourished there as he has everywhere else.
  Then, in 2018, David Barlow, to the great happiness of many of us in 
Utah who know and love him, decided to return to Utah, and he joined 
Dorsey & Whitney, LLP, as a partner in the firm's Salt Lake City 
office. For the past several years, David Barlow has had a practice 
that has focused on handling government enforcement actions and 
internal investigations, which have typically been large 
multijurisdictional matters. He is someone who knows how to handle 
complex litigation.
  I would also like to note that since I first met David Barlow, I have 
also gotten to know David Barlow's family. They are extraordinary 
people--David's wife Crystal and their children. David's parents, Bruce 
and Emily Barlow, in fact, used to live just a couple of doors down 
from me in Utah. They are as kind and decent a people as you could ever 
hope to meet. While one's parents certainly can't independently qualify 
one for service in a lifetime article III judicial appointment, if ever 
one could qualify through that route, that would probably qualify him 
here simply because Bruce and Emily Barlow are perhaps the most kind 
and decent people I have ever met and the warmest and loveliest 
neighbors anyone could ever hope to have.
  For all these reasons, and based on Mr. Barlow's mastery of the law, 
his professionalism, his kindness, his demeanor, his collegiality, 
which I have never heard questioned or in any way called into question, 
David Barlow is qualified to be a U.S. district judge, and I am 
grateful that he will be serving once he is confirmed as judge on the 
U.S. District Court for the District of Utah.
  I urge my colleagues to support his confirmation and look forward to 
voting for him later today.