[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Page 3804]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   FILLING THE SUPREME COURT VACANCY

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, we can play around all we want with the 
Supreme Court and what the Constitution says or doesn't say, but we 
know that the Constitution says that the President shall--not may, but 
shall--nominate Supreme Court Justices. He has an obligation. He has to 
do that. The Constitution is also very affirmative: There has to be 
advice and consent. That is what we are instructed in the Constitution.
  It is a little strange how we can have from the Republicans advice 
and consent when the vast majority of the Republicans won't even meet 
with the man. They refuse to hold hearings and certainly to have a 
vote.
  So I don't know how anyone is reading the Constitution, but we need 
to do our job. We are not doing our job when we don't hold hearings and 
have a vote. We shouldn't be here talking about Supreme Court nominees 
being far left or far right or moderate.
  To show how off track this has gotten, 2 days ago the chairman of the 
Judiciary Committee, the senior Senator from Iowa, gave a speech here. 
Guess who he was attacking. Justice Roberts, the Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court. He said to the Chief Justice: Heal yourself. The Chief 
Justice. Is there anyone in the world--anyone in the United States, 
anyone in the legal field, anyone in the political field--who thinks he 
is some kind of crazy liberal, John Roberts, who worked on the court 
with Merrick Garland? They wrote opinions together. They agreed almost 
90 percent of the time on their opinions.
  So it is really too bad that now we are here with a Supreme Court 
Justice--for the first time in the history of the country, because we 
are in the final year of a Presidency, we are not going to do anything. 
We are going to wait. In the meantime, justice will be delayed. We have 
already had a significant number of tied, 4-to-4 decisions by the 
Court, and, using the logic of the Republicans, this is going to go on 
for another 18 months. So it is unfortunate that this has turned into 
something that has never happened before.
  They go back and keep repeating: The Biden rule. The Biden rule. The 
Biden rule.
  The year he gave that speech--and he gave a speech at Georgetown 
University just a week ago saying: Read my speech. Read the whole 
thing.
  And what was the result of his action as chairman of the committee 
that year? He brought nominations to the floor even though they didn't 
get enough votes in the committee to be reported. The nominees lost in 
the Judiciary Committee, but Biden brought them here anyway.
  There was an op-ed written by one of my predecessors, former 
Democratic leader George Mitchell, a stunningly good Senator from 
Maine. He wrote that 2 days ago. It appeared in a Boston newspaper. He 
said that when Clarence Thomas came before the Senate, he had lost in 
the committee. He didn't get enough votes to be reported out of the 
committee. Biden reported him out anyway: Bring him to the floor. Let's 
have a debate.
  That is what Senator Mitchell talked about. We had a debate. And he 
had pressure. It wasn't tremendous, but he had pressure. People asked: 
Why don't you filibuster him? He said: I am not going to filibuster. 
Let's have a vote, and that is the way it used to be done. He had 52 
votes. Could that have been stopped? Of course. Would the Court have 
been better? Observers can make the determination themselves as to 
whether we would be better off without Clarence Thomas on that Court. 
But the fact is he could have been stopped easily, and it wasn't done.

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