[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 18]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 25051]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 H.R. 3632, THE ``FEDERAL JUDICIARY ADMINISTRATIVE IMPROVEMENT ACT OF 
                                 2009''

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. LAMAR SMITH

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 15, 2009

  Mr. SMITH of Texas. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may 
consume.
  The purpose of H.R. 3632 is to implement non-controversial 
administrative provisions that the Judicial Conference and the House 
Judiciary Committee believe are necessary to improve the operations of 
the Federal judiciary and provide justice for the American people.
  The Judicial Conference is the policy-making body of the Federal 
judiciary and through its committee system evaluates court operations. 
The Conference endorses all of the provisions in the bill.
  H.R. 3632 affects a wide range of judicial branch programs and 
operations, including those pertaining to financial administration, 
process improvements, and personnel administration.
  The bill incorporates nine separate items, including:
  A section that clarifies that senior judges must satisfy minimum work 
thresholds to participate in court government matters, including the 
selection of magistrates.
  A section that eliminates the references to divisions and counties in 
the statutory description of the Judicial District of North Dakota, 
which enables the court to better distribute the workload between two 
active district judges and reduce travel for litigants in the northern 
central area of the district.
  A section that authorizes the ``statement of reasons'' that judges 
must issue upon sentencing to be filed separately with the court. 
Current law requires the statement to be bundled with other information 
in the case file distributed to the Sentencing Commission, where it can 
be difficult to maintain a seal related to confidential information.
  A section that specifies that federal pretrial services officers can 
provide the same services to juveniles as they do for adult offenders. 
An example would be drug treatment.
  And a section that applies an inflationary index to the threshold 
amount requiring approval by the chief judge of reimbursements for the 
cost of hiring expert witnesses and conducting investigations for 
indigent defendants. The dollar thresholds are statutorily fixed and 
erode over time. This means chief judges must devote greater time 
approving what are otherwise not genuine ``high-dollar'' requests.
  Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3632 is necessary to improve the functioning of the 
U.S. courts, which will ultimately benefit the American people. This is 
a non-controversial bill and I urge my colleagues to support it.

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