[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2011-2054]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     EXECUTIVE CALENDAR--Continued

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, first of all, I rise to speak in favor 
of the Senate confirming Senator Sessions to the position of Attorney 
General, chief law enforcement officer of our country, but I do want to 
say thank you to the Democratic minority of my committee because they 
did not boycott the meetings. They debated. They debated too long, from 
my point of view, but they debated, and we were able to do our work in 
a businesslike way. So I want to thank all of them for their 
participation.
  Now I will take a few minutes to speak in strong support of my friend 
and our colleague Senator Jeff Sessions to serve as the 84th Attorney 
General.
  Last week, the Judiciary Committee spent over 6 hours debating the 
nomination. Every single Democrat opposed the nomination, but this 
wasn't, of course, much of a surprise. During our committee debate, 
Senator Graham correctly pointed out that, based on the standard the 
Democrats established, it appears no Republican could ever earn their 
support.
  It is no secret that our Democratic colleagues don't like the new 
President. They are doing what they can do to undermine the new 
administration.
  With respect to Senator Sessions, my Democratic colleagues disagree 
with a number of policy positions he has taken over the years, but this 
year seems to be unlike previous administrations, where Senators 
supported Cabinet nominees even if they disagreed with the nominee on 
policy grounds. That is what happened in 2009, when Senator Sessions 
and I both supported Eric Holder for Attorney General, even though we 
disagreed with him on many policies.
  So after listening to all the reasons they are opposing this 
nomination, I can boil their objections down to these points:
  Even though many of my colleagues have known this good man for years, 
even though many of my colleagues have worked closely with him to pass 
important bipartisan legislation, even though many of them have praised 
him in the past for his integrity and for being a man of his word, even 
though Senator Sessions has pledged to support and defend all laws 
passed by Congress, even those he disagrees with, when it comes time to 
stand up in support of this good man, they are unwilling to take him at 
his word.
  This is very troubling because all of us in the Senate know Jeff 
Sessions. Some of us have known him for decades. Regardless of what my 
colleagues are willing to admit publicly, we all know him to be a man 
of deep integrity, a man of his word, and a man committed to fairness, 
to justice, and, most importantly, to the rule of law.
  We all know that when Senator Sessions served as an assistant U.S. 
attorney, as a U.S. attorney, and as attorney general for his home 
State of Alabama, he worked hard to promote the rule of law and to 
bring justice to both victims and perpetrators. We know he has a deep 
commitment to the rule of law, something an Attorney General must 
possess or he could not be the chief law enforcement officer of the 
United States. In other words, that law or that position is all about 
carrying out and having a commitment to the rule of law. As I said, 
much of Senator Sessions' hearing focused on his record as a 
legislator.
  Now, it is true Senator Sessions has voted on legislation in ways 
that the left doesn't like, and of course I have even disagreed with 
him from time to time, but we all understand that every time we cast a 
vote, we are voting the way we see as the best for our country. I think 
we all also understand that very rarely is any bill a so-called perfect 
piece of legislation.
  At one time or another, every single Member of this body has opposed 
legislation based upon a principle objection to a particular provision.
  So, of course, Senator Sessions has voted differently than his 
Democratic colleagues. Now, that is common sense. That is to be 
expected. This is the Senate. We are all about debating policy and for 
long periods of time. That is how the Senate works.
  We all know the role of an Senator and the role of Attorney General 
are very, very different. A legislator debates policy and votes on 
legislation. The Attorney General enforces the laws, as enacted. All of 
us in the Senate understand that difference. Senator Sessions 
understands the difference better than most.
  In addition to serving as a Senator for 20 years, he served in the 
Department of Justice for 15 years, a Department dedicated to law 
enforcement and to the rule of law and following what Congress directs 
law to be.
  I am disappointed in my colleagues who have suggested Senator 
Sessions will not be able to put aside his policy differences that he 
established here in the United States and enforce the law, even if he 
voted against that law.
  This is especially troubling after he specifically committed to us 
during this confirmation hearing that if he is confirmed, he will 
follow the law, regardless of whether he supported that statute as a 
policy matter.
  The criteria for this nomination is, will this man, whose integrity 
is beyond reproach, enforce the law as he said he will?
  Senator Sessions answered that question directly during his hearing. 
He stated this:

       The Justice Department must remain ever faithful to the 
     Constitution's promise that our government is one of laws and 
     not of

[[Page 2012]]

     men. It will be my unyielding commitment to you, if 
     confirmed, to see that the laws are enforced faithfully, 
     effectively, and impartially.

  He goes on to say:

       The Attorney General must hold everyone, no matter how 
     powerful, accountable. No one is above the law, and no 
     American will be beneath its protection.

  Now, whether he said those things one time or dozens of times--and it 
is more apt to be dozens of times during the day and a half of hearings 
that we had on him, plus the speeches that were given--it can't be much 
clearer than what he just said.
  But even after he made this promise, Members asked Senator Sessions 
if he would defend the laws that he had voted against, and he answered 
in the affirmative, stating:

       I would defend the statute if it is reasonably defensible. 
     It is passed by Congress, it would be the duty of the 
     Attorney General, whether they voted for it or support it, to 
     defend it.

  He was questioned about a host of hot-button policy issues. Time and 
again, his answer was the same. He will enforce the law. This will 
actually be quite different from the Obama administration, which 
refused to enforce laws it didn't like. They did this while the people 
who are now in the minority--the Democrats--turned a blind eye when 
they didn't enforce the law.
  Senator Sessions also made clear that he possesses the independence 
necessary for the Attorney General. I have often heard Senator Sessions 
ask Executive nominees, including nominees for Attorney General, 
whether they will have the fortitude to stand up to the President who 
appointed them. So I asked him the same question during my time of 
questioning in the committee. I asked if he will be able to say no to 
President Trump, and he said:

       I understand the importance of your question, I understand 
     the responsibility of the Attorney General, and I will do so. 
     You simply have to help the President do things that he might 
     desire in a lawful way and have to be able to say, ``No,'' 
     both for the country, for the legal system, and for the 
     President to avoid situations that are not acceptable. I 
     understand that duty. I have observed it through my years 
     here, and I will fulfill that responsibility.

  Senator Sessions' commitment to be independent from the President 
when it is necessary and his promise to enforce the law is exactly what 
this Nation needs right now. We haven't seen much of this over the past 
8 years.
  The Department has been politicized over the past 8 years, and that 
has caused great harm. The leadership of the Department of Justice has 
undermined our confidence in the rule of law by picking and choosing 
which laws it will enforce. I am looking forward to turning a new page 
at the Department under our friend's leadership as Attorney General. It 
is desperately needed, particularly at this time.
  Last weekend, in particular, it showed us how critical it is to have 
someone leading the Department who is committed to following the law. 
Last week, then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates announced that she 
wouldn't present arguments in defense of the President's recent 
Executive order, even though she admitted there was a defense to be 
made. As soon as she did this, Democrats ran to her defense and sang 
her praises, but after Senator Sessions' hearing, I would have expected 
Democrats to come to the opposite conclusion. During his hearing, they 
asked Senator Sessions whether he would enforce a law that he didn't 
like over and over and over. But last week, Ms. Yates refused to 
enforce a law--why?--because she didn't like it, and the Democrats 
lauded her ``bravery'' and ``courage.''
  They lauded her ``courage.''
  Now, let's be very clear. She didn't say that she can't 
constitutionally defend the President's order or offer good-faith 
defenses of its legality in the court. Instead, this is what--she 
explained her decision by saying her job is not the same as the job in 
the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. She said, 
importantly, OLC, meaning Office of Legal Counsel, does not address 
whether any policy choice embodied in an Executive order is wise or 
just. That seems to suggest, of course, that the decision on whether to 
defend an Executive order or statute in court turns on whether the 
Attorney General believes the law or order is wise or just. But with 
all respect to Ms. Yates, that wasn't her job. The Department's job is 
to enforce the law, just like Senator Sessions, becoming Attorney 
General, said he would enforce the law. Ms. Yates' obligation was 
clear. If she couldn't defend the order in good conscience, the only 
proper course was to resign.
  This unfortunate situation with Ms. Yates highlights why it is 
important to swiftly move to confirm an Attorney General who will be 
faithful to the Constitution and uphold the law regardless of policy 
preferences.
  Ultimately, it comes down to this: There is no one more qualified 
than Jeff Sessions for this position. He served in the Department for 
15 years. He served as attorney general for his home State of Alabama, 
and for 20 years he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has 
oversight over the Department of Justice.
  We all know Senator Sessions is a man of his word. We all know he 
will enforce all the laws on the books, regardless of whether he 
supported them. Both Republicans and Democrats know he will make an 
excellent Attorney General, and the Nation will be served well by his 
appointment. I urge all of my colleagues to vote in favor of the 
nomination.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, thank you very much, and I want to 
thank the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his 
remarks. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with him, and we 
have a number of major issues forthcoming.
  I rise to oppose the nomination of Senator Sessions to become the 
Attorney General of the United States. I think some of us and I 
certainly have lived through many difficult times in this country, but 
today this country is as divided as I have ever seen it.
  Some Republicans have said that Democrats are in the anger stage of 
grief, but with all due respect, those statements just trivialize what 
is going on in this country. It is not trivial, and it is not small. 
Today America is a country split in half, with at least half objecting 
to the actions of this President, including his nominee for Attorney 
General.
  My office has received approximately 114,000 calls and emails 
regarding Senator Sessions, with 112,000--more than 98 percent--opposed 
to this nominee. I would like to quote a few of my constituents who 
deeply oppose this President and this nominee and have been taking to 
the streets to protect the fundamental values of America.
  Here is one from a doctor:

       I marched because of the thousands of patients I've seen in 
     the community, people of color, immigrants from all over the 
     globe, who are terrified about the loss of their rights and 
     the dramatic explosion of racially and culturally focused 
     hate crimes we're reading about.
       I marched on Saturday because women must not be denigrated, 
     as we've seen by the attitude exemplified by our new 
     President in his unmeasured remarks.
       I marched on Saturday because I'm desperately worried that 
     the progress this country has made in recognizing the rights 
     of all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity and religious 
     belief, is now threatened with a roll-back to the `50s.
       The American process of justice is a beacon and an example 
     to the world. Jeff Sessions must not be confirmed.

  Here is another:

       As a Californian who wants to finish school, as a 
     Californian with ``pre-existing conditions,'' as a Latina and 
     as the kid of a South American immigrant--I don't know what I 
     can say other than please, please, protect us from whatever 
     is coming as best you can.

  One woman who marched after the inauguration came to my office the 
following Monday and wrote a handwritten note explaining why she 
marched. Here is what it said:

       Our President quickly dismisses all protesters as 
     ``professionals'' and ``sore losers.'' I am here in 
     Washington for his first full week of the presidency to send 
     the message that I am neither a ``professional'' nor a ``sore 
     loser''--just an ordinary American citizen who can no longer 
     sleep well at night

[[Page 2013]]

     worrying about how his agenda will negatively impact not only 
     our country, but democracies all over the globe. America is 
     already great; what Trump and his administration will do is 
     destroy it.

  To my constituents--112,000 have called and emailed to oppose this 
nominee--let me just say this: I hear you.
  To my Republican colleagues, this is not grief about losing an 
election. At no time when my party lost an election or when the 
President was of a different party did I feel the way I feel today. For 
most Presidents, there is hope--a hope of unity, a hope of bringing 
people together, a sense of common purpose. That is what it means to be 
a leader of this country, the whole country--red States and blue 
States, all of our people.
  President Obama began his tenure in office with a 69-percent approval 
rating. President George W. Bush talked about compassionate 
conservatism. After a terrorist attack killed nearly 3,000 people, 
President Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington on September 
17, 2001, and said: ``Islam is peace.''
  He said:

       Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of 
     the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And 
     they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and 
     emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with 
     respect.

  Incidentally, President Eisenhower dedicated the Islamic Center in 
1957, and here is what he said then:

       Under the American Constitution, under American tradition, 
     and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, 
     is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other 
     religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength 
     for your right to have here your own church and worship 
     according to your own conscience.

  Now, Mr. President, that was the man who led American and Allied 
forces in Europe against Nazi Germany, a regime of pure evil that 
targeted Jews based on their religion and exterminated millions of 
Jews, Poles, Serbs, Roma, Soviet citizens, gays, lesbians, and many 
others. President Eisenhower was saying that this country, the United 
States of America, would fight with her whole strength to protect the 
religious freedom of Muslims. ``Without that concept,'' President 
Eisenhower said, ``we would be something else than what we are.''
  Can anybody even imagine Donald Trump uttering words like two of his 
Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush?
  Instead, there is attack after attack after attack on minorities, on 
immigrants, on Muslims, on women, on his critics, on judges, on the 
press, and yes, even on truth itself.
  There is the President's Muslim ban Executive order, which our 
government says has caused between 60,000 and 100,000 visas to be 
revoked. That order, which caused chaos at airports around the country, 
is now subject to nearly 60 legal challenges in Federal courts. On 
Friday, a Federal judge in Washington State blocked implementation of 
major portions of the Executive order. The judge, appointed by 
President George W. Bush, was then promptly attacked on Twitter by 
President Donald Trump. This afternoon, the Ninth Circuit will review 
the stay.
  To say this is just a stage of grief after losing an election is 
really to ignore reality.
  Last week Sally Yates had to stand up and tell the President no. Now 
more than ever, it is clear how important it is that the Department of 
Justice be independent from the President. When she stood up, she was 
promptly fired by this President. And not only was she fired, but her 
integrity and her character were maligned in an over-the-top press 
statement. This woman is a career prosecutor with 27 years of 
experience. She was the lead prosecutor in the terrorist prosecution of 
1996 Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph. She actually went after a real 
terrorist, and she got a conviction. The President called her a 
``disgrace'' and ``weak on borders.''
  Here is the point: This is the man for whom Senator Sessions has been 
a stalwart campaign advocate. In response to my written questions, 
Senator Sessions stated: ``I endorsed him in part because he was a 
leader advocating for issues I supported and believed in.''
  Senator Sessions was a close campaign adviser and supporter of the 
President. He was the first Senator to endorse him. He spoke on Trump's 
behalf at the National Republican Convention. He appeared at numerous 
rallies. He attended at least 45 campaign events. During the campaign, 
he spoke at large rallies, smiling and laughing, while crowds chanted 
``Lock her up.''
  Then in October of last year, at one of the Presidential debates and 
again at a rally in Virginia, Candidate Trump repeatedly referred to 
him as ``my attorney general.''
  A month after the announcement of his nomination to be Attorney 
General, he appeared again with the President-elect on a thank-you tour 
in Alabama. This was a rally where many of the President's campaign 
promises, such as building the wall, were repeated. Crowds once again 
chanted ``Lock her up.'' The President-elect introduced him, and 
Senator Sessions came forward. As he walked out to speak to dramatic 
effect, he whipped out a ``Make America Great Again'' hat, put it on, 
and pumped his fists into the air.
  Already, at this point, he had been designated to be the next 
Attorney General of the United States, an independent legal check on 
the President, a man who responds to the Constitution and the law 
independent of the Chief Executive. One would have thought a sense of 
the solemn duty of the Office of Attorney General would have counseled 
against appearing at yet another political rally with Trump, but it did 
not.
  At that rally, as Attorney General designate, Sessions said that the 
Trump campaign was ``more than a normal campaign, but a movement,'' and 
when he finished speaking, he thanked the President-elect for ``the 
opportunity to participate in a movement that I believe can help make 
America great again.''
  So, to me, this is key. This shows how Senator Sessions views this 
appointment--as an ``opportunity to participate in a movement'' to 
advance the President's agenda. This is not the role of the Attorney 
General of the United States. This is more political than any Attorney 
General nominee in recent memory has ever been. Can we really expect 
him to be an Attorney General who is independent from President Trump? 
I do not believe so.
  In fact, a recent Washington Post story reports the depth of Senator 
Sessions' involvement in the Trump transition. The Washington Post 
reported that during the transition, ``Sessions became a daily presence 
at Trump Tower in New York, mapping out the policy agenda and making 
personnel decisions.'' In fact, you can search C-SPAN, the Web site, 
for video of Senator Sessions speaking at Trump Tower about the 
transition.
  On November 15, in the lobby of Trump Tower, he said:

       My former chief of staff is doing a great job under 
     incredible demands, and the whole team is working long hours 
     I mean, 20 hours a day kind of work and just remarkable what 
     is happening. I'm one of the co-chairs, of five, I believe, 
     co-chairs of the committee under Vice President-elect Pence.

  Then Senator Sessions said, ``Steve Bannon is a powerful intellect 
and a thoughtful leader that consistently provides good advice.''
  We learned last week that Steve Bannon thinks the same thing about 
Senator Sessions. As Bannon wrote to the Washington Post just days ago, 
Sessions was--and I quote, and here it is--``the fiercest, most 
dedicated and most loyal promoter in Congress of Trump's agenda, and 
has played a critical role as the clearinghouse for policy and 
philosophy to undergird the implementation of that agenda.''
  The Post went on to report that Senator Sessions ``lobbied for a 
`shock-and-awe' period of executive action that would rattle Congress, 
impress Trump's base, and catch his critics unaware, according to two 
officials involved in the transition planning.''
  The article says: ``Sessions had advocated going even faster.''
  Now, we have seen the consequences of those actions, and what is the 
result? Division, legal challenges, people marching in the streets.
  Senator Sessions is not a man apart from this agenda. He is not 
independent of this agenda. He is part of it.

[[Page 2014]]

He is committed to it. He is a leader of it.
  Now, let me move to other parts of Senator Sessions' record and what 
we learned from him in the hearing.
  I said earlier that I cannot imagine a more important time for the 
Department of Justice to be independent of the President. Part of that 
is because of what we know about the Russians and their illegal efforts 
to get this President elected.
  The Intelligence Community has reached the following conclusions 
about Russian activities during the election, among others: ``We assess 
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 
aimed at the U.S. presidential election.''
  Quote: ``Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the United 
States Democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her 
electability and potential presidency.''
  Quote: ``We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed 
a clear preference for President-elect Trump.''
  Quote: ``We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to 
help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by 
discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably 
to him.''
  Quote: ``We assess with high confidence that Russian military 
intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used 
the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release U.S. victim data 
obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media 
outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.''
  These are just some of the conclusions that our intelligence 
agencies--all of them--have reached, including the FBI.
  The Department of Justice, through the National Security Division and 
the FBI, has an important role to play in investigating and prosecuting 
Russians or coconspirators in this matter. The FBI, as I said, was part 
of the assessment that led to the January report.
  Now, Senator Sessions chaired the President's National Security 
Advisory Committee during the campaign. That is a committee on which 
National Security Advisor Flynn served. So he was Trump's top person on 
national security, and it is no secret that explosive allegations about 
the President's and his campaign team's connections to Russia are out 
there.
  As a Senator, including as a member of the Armed Services Committee, 
Senator Sessions was quite critical of Russia. In 2000, he said Russia 
is a country where leaders lie, cheat, and steal to maintain political 
office.
  That was a floor speech on April 13, 2000.
  In 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, Senator Sessions said, ``I 
believe a systematic effort should be undertaken so that Russia feels 
pain for this.''
  This was in the Montgomery Advertiser, March 19, 2014.
  When he was a Senator in the 1990s, he and other Republican Judiciary 
Committee members called for a special prosecutor because of 
allegations of $1 million in Chinese monetary contributions to a 
Presidential campaign.
  That is from a floor speech on March 9, 2000.
  He pointed to the campaign connection and said that meant the 
Attorney General needed to appoint a special prosecutor. He said: 
``This is serious business. We ought not to treat this lightly.''
  Floor speech, March 9, 2000.
  Yet, now that our intelligence community has concluded that Russia, 
at the direction of Vladimir Putin, invaded the American political 
process with massive hacks and leaks for the purpose of favoring 
candidate Trump, Senator Sessions says that he has not even reviewed 
the intelligence community's reports.
  When asked in writing by myself in Question for the Record 2b after 
his hearing whether he had even read the intelligence assessments, 
classified or unclassified, he said he had not read either one.
  Now, that is stunning. One of the most important national security 
revelations in recent years, and he is nominated to be Attorney 
General, and he hasn't reviewed it? Why? He attended 45 campaign 
events, was intimately involved in the campaign and transition, but 
despite all of this, he would not commit himself to recuse himself.
  This should be of real concern to all of us.
  Another nation--namely, Russia--has attacked our political process in 
a major way: hacking a political party and leaking its internal 
deliberations. This time, it targeted the Democratic Party; next time, 
it could be the Republican Party, but whichever party it is, we can't 
let this continue.
  Intelligence and law enforcement professionals must be able to follow 
the facts wherever they lead. The investigation could lead to the 
prosecution of people who helped hack and leak information hacked by 
Russia to help the President's campaign. It obviously has the potential 
to create embarrassment for the President and his people, and to 
implicate people involved in the campaign.
  So the question is a big one, and we ought to think about it. How 
will this nominee handle investigation and prosecution into an 
unprecedented and major foreign intrusion into the election of the 
President of the United States? Can he be independent of the White 
House? I do not believe he can.
  Let me move on to voting rights. Senator Sessions long ago testified 
that he thought the Voting Rights Act was an intrusive piece of 
legislation. He acknowledged this again in his hearing. In 1986, 
Senator Sessions said: ``It is a serious thing . . . for the Federal 
Government to come in and sue a county and say we are going to change 
the form of government you have been living with for 20 years.''
  That implies a hesitation to use the Voting Rights Act to change 
certain systems of election in counties that were adopted to 
disenfranchise minorities.
  When we considered the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization of 2006, the 
Senator voted for it. But he also expressed skepticism about the 
preclearance provision of the act, section 5, which was a core part of 
the act. And then, when the Supreme Court narrowly ruled five to four 
in Shelby County--that is a decision--and that section 5 of the Voting 
Rights Act could no longer be enforced, Senator Sessions called it 
``good news for the South.''
  What does that mean? It means State after State that had been 
prevented from denying the right to vote by section 5 can now proceed 
unless they are affirmatively stopped by a new lawsuit that takes time 
to develop, and a wave of new laws suppressing the vote were quickly 
passed following the Supreme Court's ruling.
  He has tried to argue that he will fully enforce the Voting Rights 
Act. In his committee questionnaire, he pointed to 4 cases he claimed 
were among the 10 most significant litigated cases he personally 
handled. As Senator Franken demonstrated in our committee, his record 
of handling these cases is thin, at best. Lawyers who handled three of 
the cases say Senator Sessions had no substantive involvement. He did 
not mention them in his 1986 questionnaire, even though the cases were 
ongoing at that time. And now he says he played a supporting or 
assistance role in them.
  So these cases do not make me confident that as Attorney General 
overseeing the Civil Rights Division, he will ensure that the civil 
rights and voting rights laws are fairly enforced.
  So I asked him questions to see what he would do. I pointed out in 
written questions that several voter ID laws have now been struck down, 
or severely limited, under the Voting Rights Act. Just one example: One 
of the most conservative appeals courts in the Nation, the Fifth 
Circuit, found that Texas's law violates the Voting Rights Act. 
According to the courts, 608,470 registered voters in Texas lack 
required ID, and Black and Latino voters were far more likely than 
White voters to lack the required ID. The court found that the Texas 
law had a discriminatory effect, in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
  Now, this means the Justice Department can protect the voting rights 
of Americans in these cases. So I asked

[[Page 2015]]

him, would you continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act in these 
situations? There is now precedent for it. He would not answer. He 
tried to say that the Supreme Court has actually held that voter ID 
laws do not necessarily violate the Voting Rights Act.
  That is my written question for the record, No. 14.
  But the Supreme Court decision he referenced, Crawford v. Marion 
County Election Board, did not talk about the Voting Rights Act at all.
  So I asked him to clarify his response. His answer indicated that it 
was just his own view that voter ID laws do not necessarily violate the 
Voting Rights Act. This was a follow-up question, No. 7a. That may be 
his personal view, but the courts' view is that these laws can and in 
some circumstances do violate the Voting Rights Act. But he still has 
refused to say whether he will bring those cases.
  Then, when asked about voter fraud by Senator Coons, Senator Sessions 
responded that he believes ``fraudulent activities regularly occur'' 
during elections. He pointed to a single report to support his view 
that voter ID laws are a good idea. That is Senator Coons' question for 
the record 9b. He refused to comment on data provided by Senator Coons 
that showed the rarity of in-person voter impersonation fraud, which is 
the only thing a voter ID law can catch. He didn't comment about the 
impact on hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters, many of them 
minorities and students, who are denied the fundamental right to vote 
by these laws.
  Now we have the President on Twitter and television claiming that 
millions of illegal votes were cast and that is why he lost the popular 
vote by nearly 3 million votes, and he is ordering his administration 
to investigate that. If President Trump asks Attorney General Sessions 
to carry out his partisan, pointless investigation, what will Senator 
Sessions do? Is the legendary Civil Rights Division of the Justice 
Department going to become President Trump's political investigator? Or 
will it defend and use the Voting Rights Act to protect the right to 
vote of millions of Americans against efforts by States to take that 
right away? I just don't have confidence that Jeff Sessions will fairly 
apply the law in this area.
  Now, if confirmed, what will Senator Sessions do when faced with 
questions on reproductive rights? Will he undermine a woman's 
fundamental right to control her own body and her own reproductive 
system?
  In 2015, Senator Sessions voted for legislation that would impose a 
nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks. That legislation had a 
penalty of jailing doctors for up to 5 years, and it would have forced 
survivors of rape and incest to overcome additional and medically 
unnecessary hurdles before they could receive an abortion. The 
legislation also had no exception for a woman's health and only a 
narrow exception to save her life.
  Imagine what it is like to be a woman who learns that she has serious 
complications late in pregnancy and that she will suffer debilitating 
physical health effects if she cannot get an abortion. Then imagine 
having to tell her that her health must suffer for the rest of her life 
because politicians have prohibited her from making her own health care 
decisions. But this is the outcome Senator Sessions voted for.
  Senator Sessions believes the case that established a woman's right 
to control her own reproductive system--Roe v. Wade--is one of the 
``worst, colossally erroneous Supreme Court decisions of all time.'' In 
fact, weeks ago when testifying before our committee, I asked him if 
this is still his view, and he said ``it is.'' He even said Roe v. Wade 
``violated the Constitution.''
  That statement essentially invites States to enact more and more 
restrictions on women's fundamental access to health care. It is a 
signal to those States that if they enact restrictions and are 
challenged in court, then the Justice Department may in fact support 
them and try to overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, I asked him about that, 
and he did not rule out the Justice Department's pushing to overturn 
Roe. He left the door open by saying:

       Such decisions would depend upon the unique circumstances 
     of the case or cases as they arise. I will not pre-judge the 
     issues.

  That is the response to my question for the record 6a.
  He even refused to rule out punishment for women who have abortions--
a position President Trump took during the campaign. That is a response 
to Senator Blumenthal's question for the record 11a.
  So what does it mean for him, as Attorney General of the United 
States? It means he very well may seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. It 
means the Justice Department may go to court and support continued 
State efforts to further and further restrict the rights of women to 
control their own reproductive system.
  The bottom line: I do not have confidence that Senator Sessions will 
fairly and independently safeguard the freedoms of the women of 
America.
  Let me move on to immigration. Senator Sessions has been the 
staunchest opponent of comprehensive immigration reform, preventing the 
passage of legislation to strengthen the border and prevent families 
from being torn apart.
  Senator Sessions opposed immigration reform so strenuously that he 
drafted and distributed his own book entitled ``Immigration Handbook 
for the New Republican Majority.'' This handbook implied that 
immigrants were taking jobs from low-income minorities and abusing 
public benefit programs--setting people against each other. More 
alarmingly, Senator Sessions voted at least twice against the DREAM 
Act, which seeks to protect some of our country's most vulnerable 
youth, undocumented individuals--children--who were brought here 
through no choice of their own.
  On President Obama's Executive action to protect those children--
known as DACA--he doesn't just oppose it. He is actively seeking to 
take it down. A recent Washington Post article says he is lobbying for 
the administration to overturn DACA. It is one thing to disagree on 
policy, but it is quite another when the policy could crush the lives 
of ordinary people.
  In December, I wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about 
the importance of DACA and what it means for Californians.
  I discussed the story of Denisse Rojas, brought to the United States 
as a 10-month-old baby. Rojas' family is similar to many families with 
mixed status. Her mother and father came to the United States to create 
a better life for their children.
  Denisse excelled in high school and majored in biology at UC 
Berkeley. She worked as a waitress and commuted an hour each way to 
classes because she couldn't afford to live near campus. After 
graduation, she volunteered at San Francisco General Hospital. Denisse 
dreamed of going to medical school, driven in part by a family member's 
early death from cancer. The disease was diagnosed at a late stage 
because the family's immigration status made it impossible to afford 
health insurance.
  Today, Rojas is enrolled in New York's Icahn School of Medicine at 
Mount Sinai, where she is on track to earn her degree in 2019. She 
intends to specialize in emergency medicine and work in low-income 
communities to provide health care to families, like her own, who would 
otherwise go without necessary treatment.
  This is the perfect case for discretion. This is the perfect case for 
the exercise of a just humanity. But Senator Sessions is lobbying to 
overturn DACA. The consequences of such a draconian and inhumane action 
would be devastating to thousands of people in my State, and I find it 
deeply disturbing that Senator Sessions would advocate for the 
deportation of children who have known no other country but the United 
States.
  If he doesn't believe these youth deserve some sort of prosecutorial 
discretion when it comes to deportation, how is he going to act as our 
Nation's leading Federal criminal prosecutor?
  It is no secret that he believes in an aggressive use of executive 
enforcement power in the area of immigration. He testified in response 
to Senator

[[Page 2016]]

Flake that he favors ``a zero tolerance'' policy for immigration 
crimes. Immigration offenses already make up about a third of all 
Federal prosecutions each year. So does it make sense to increase that 
substantially? There certainly are more troubling crimes at the border 
and across the country that require the attention and resources of the 
Department of Justice: human trafficking, smugglers, organized crime, 
gangs, drug trafficking, hate crimes, white-collar crimes, civil 
rights, and voting rights, just to name a few. So Senator Sessions' 
opposition to prosecutorial discretion caused me great concern.
  Let's move on to criminal law.
  During the hearing, discussing sentencing with Senator Coons, Senator 
Sessions revealed his view about what a Federal prosecutor should be. 
He said it was ``a problematic thing'' that is ``difficult to justify'' 
when a prosecutor uses some discretion to bring lesser charges or not 
to charge the maximum drug charge available.
  As we know, drug prosecutions were the most common Federal charge in 
2015. So Senator Sessions' view on them will have a big impact on the 
workload in U.S. attorneys' offices. If it becomes the nationwide 
policy of the Department, it will mean mandatory sentences of 5 years, 
10 years, 20 years, and even life in prison for drug charges will be 
imposed much more often, because depending on how prosecutors charge 
cases, the law will tie a judge's hands when it comes to a sentence. 
That is how our system works today.
  The mission of a prosecutor is to do justice, not instinctively bring 
the maximum charge. As then-Attorney General Robert Jackson said in 
1940:

       The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and 
     reputation than any other person in America. His discretion 
     is tremendous.
       Your positions are of such independence and importance that 
     while you are being diligent, strict, and vigorous in law 
     enforcement, you can also afford to be just. Although the 
     government technically loses its case, it has really won if 
     justice has been done.

  For Senator Sessions to say that a prosecutor cannot exercise some 
judgment, based on the circumstances of a case, to seek a lesser charge 
or a lesser punishment, in my view, is just not correct.
  We have discussed mandatory minimum sentencing in the Judiciary 
Committee. The Senator from Illinois, distinguished as he is, has been 
a leader in this cause. It has been discussed for years in the context 
of the sentencing reform efforts led by Senators Lee, Cornyn, Durbin, 
Grassley, Leahy, and Whitehouse. Senator Lee, in particular, has been a 
passionate advocate against mandatory minimum sentencing.
  I believe in enforcement of the drug laws. I always have. There are 
difficult questions about what actions the Justice Department would 
take in States that have legalized marijuana in some way or another 
under their own laws.
  The bottom line is this: sensitivity and good judgment are needed in 
prosecutorial decisions. We want to make sure the sentence fits the 
crime and that resources are used wisely. Senator Sessions' comments 
make it clear that he generally opposes granting discretion to a 
prosecutor to impose a lesser charge or a lesser sentence based on the 
circumstances of the case before them.
  One thing I found striking was that in Senator Sessions' written 
statement to the committee, he said the following: ``I understand the 
demands for justice and fairness made by the LGBT community.''
  I have served on the Judiciary Committee for 24 years. Twenty of them 
have been alongside Senator Sessions. I cannot recall a single time 
when he spoke about supporting any kind of ``justice and fairness'' for 
the LGBT community or made any kind of statement like this. We looked 
and couldn't find one in the Congressional Record either. In fact, the 
statement stands at odds with his record.
  Let me give you a few examples. In 2011, we marked up a bill I had 
introduced to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, that 
denied married gay and lesbian couples equal protection under the law. 
Not only did Senator Sessions vote no--as all Republicans on the 
committee did--but he asked questions like, ``What about two 
sisters?''--as if to compare same-sex marriage to incest, a demeaning 
statement about hundreds of thousands of families in this country.
  He voted against allowing gay and lesbian Americans to serve in the 
military. In 2009, he voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, 
Jr. Hate Crimes Act. He said he did not see the kind of discrimination 
happening against the LGBT community or women. He said the law was 
potentially unconstitutional, which is not an argument that, to my 
knowledge, has ever been accepted by a court.
  In 2006, he voted to enshrine discrimination in our Constitution by 
supporting the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage 
everywhere in the country. What did he say? He said the Senate had to 
debate the amendment because of a ``deliberate and sustained effort by 
leftists in America,'' ``social activists,'' and ``activist judges.''
  He talked about harm to children, ignoring the fact that same-sex 
couples are raising children and that denying equal recognition to 
their families actually hurts those children. Then he went on to 
criticize the 2003 decision of the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, 
which essentially said that private homosexual conduct cannot be made a 
crime in this Nation.
  The Lawrence decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, was a 
victory for freedom. How did Senator Sessions describe it? He argued 
the decision was wrong, and ``troubling with far-reaching 
ramifications.'' He said it was a ``new vision of social justice, 
masquerading . . . as constitutional law.''
  He called Justice Scalia's dissent ``brilliant.'' That dissent, by 
the way, accused the Supreme Court of ``sign[ing] on to the so-called 
homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some 
homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that 
has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.''
  When he was Attorney General of Alabama, he sought to shut down a 
conference of LGBT students on a public university campus in Alabama. 
This was despite a Supreme Court decision issued just a year earlier 
protecting a Christian student group from discrimination based on 
viewpoint.
  The Eleventh Circuit Court--in a panel of three judges appointed by 
Republican Presidents--called the State's action ``blatant viewpoint 
discrimination'' and characterized Sessions' arguments as ``feeble.''
  Does any of this sound like the actions of a person who understands 
the demands for justice and fairness made by the LGBT community? My 
answer is no.
  How will that impact the Attorney General? The Attorney General must 
enforce Federal hate crimes laws. The Attorney General must ensure that 
Federal law treats same-sex couples equally; that the right to marry 
and be treated equally under Federal law is recognized and protected.
  Here we are, I think, at a very difficult and dangerous turning 
point. We have a President with little apparent regard for 
constitutional or legal restrictions and who is willing to take to 
Twitter to target and abuse individuals and groups of Americans, and 
even belittle and demean Federal judges and the Federal court system, 
just as he did during the campaign.
  We have a President who has taken a ``shock and awe'' approach with 
cruel, un-American, and potentially illegal Executive orders even in 
his first 2 weeks in office, which this nominee reportedly urged be 
done even faster.
  We have a President who wants to bring back torture, even though--
thanks to Senator McCain--Congress has already stated it is clearly 
illegal. We have a President who is already angering long-term allies 
like Australia and making ridiculous threats of sending troops to 
Mexico.
  We have a nominee for Attorney General who is anything but 
independent. He was part and parcel of the Trump campaign apparatus, 
transition, agenda, and way of thinking.
  As Steve Bannon wrote in the Washington Post just days ago, Sessions

[[Page 2017]]

was ``the fiercest, most dedicated and most loyal promoter in Congress 
of Trump's agenda, and has played a critical role as the clearinghouse 
for policy and philosophy to undergird the implementation of that 
agenda.''
  Do any of my colleagues--Republican or Democratic--think Steve Bannon 
didn't know what he was talking about in this email to the Washington 
Post? Do any of my colleagues believe that if Senator Sessions is 
confirmed, he is going to take off the political hat and be an even-
handed Attorney General for all Americans who will tell this President 
no when it is merited on the basis of the law and the Constitution?
  I don't believe it for a second. I must vote no and urge my 
colleagues to do the same.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hoeven). The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I rise in support of the nomination of 
Senator Sessions to be Attorney General of the United States. Let me 
make a few comments about the process. I would expect that the Attorney 
General nominee know the President before they are chosen. This idea 
that Senator Sessions was close to President Trump during the campaign 
and that it is somehow a disqualifier makes absolutely zero sense to 
me.
  The bottom line is, that is exactly the kind of people you would 
expect a President to pick--someone who has been on their team, someone 
they know, someone they believe in to carry out the duties of the 
office that they are nominated for.
  I don't have the time to go through history, but I would assume that 
in past nominations--particularly for Attorney General--there has been 
some kind of relationship between the President who nominated him and 
the person who is seeking the job. If that is going to be the new 
standard, I suggest that nobody in this body ever endorse anybody for 
President because apparently you can't serve in the Cabinet. That would 
be kind of silly.
  I look at this as are you qualified for the job? Our friends on the 
other side look at it as if you don't agree with their liberal agenda, 
you can't do the job. Big difference. There has been an absolute 
wholesale attack on everything Trump when it comes to the nominations, 
with a few exceptions.
  The basis of the attack is that they don't share the world view of 
our friends on the other side. That world view was litigated pretty 
thoroughly and you lost. What do you expect Donald Trump to do after 
his campaign? I expect him to do what he said he was going to do. Some 
of it I agree with, some of it I don't. Where I don't agree with him, I 
will challenge him.
  The one challenge I will not make against this President is to deny 
him the ability to pick somebody who is clearly, in my view, qualified, 
even though I may have differences with him on particular issues.
  I would say this about Senator Sessions. I have known him for 20 
years almost. I have traveled throughout the world with Senator 
Sessions and his family. Most of the time I agree with Jeff Sessions. 
Sometimes I don't, but I found him to be an incredibly honorable man 
worthy of the job of being U.S. Senator from the great State of 
Alabama, reflecting the values of the people of Alabama. That is what 
he got elected to do, by the way.
  I think he will be uniquely qualified to be the Attorney General of 
the United States at a time of great challenge. He has been a U.S. 
attorney. He has been Attorney General of his State. He is a man 
steeped in the law. His biggest crime, I think, is that he is very 
conservative. That, to me, is not a disqualifier any more than being 
very liberal is a disqualifier.
  How do you think we felt when Barack Obama basically turned ObamaCare 
upside down with one Executive order after another every time it 
started stinking up in public? He would unilaterally change the law to 
avoid a political consequence or granting millions of people legal 
status with a stroke of a pen, well beyond his lane, struck down by the 
Court as being outside his ability as President to do.
  Not once did anybody on that side raise an objection. Eric Holder is 
a fine man. I can't remember a time when Eric Holder stood up to this 
runaway train in the Obama administration. Loretta Lynch is a fine 
woman. I can't remember one time she expressed doubt about President 
Obama's agenda. When it was left up to the courts to express doubt in 
this election, believe it or not, that had a lot to do with the way the 
last 8 years rolled out.
  This was a check-and-balance election, and you are not going to be 
able to undo the consequences of this election unfairly. I think it 
would be unfair to say that Senator Jeff Sessions is not qualified for 
the job at hand.
  Most of the attacks against Senator Sessions could be levied against 
almost everybody on this side of the aisle. The NAACP, according to 
Jeff Sessions, is one of the premier civil rights organizations in the 
history of the country. I think that is a fair characterization. Mr. 
Cornell Brooks, CEO of the NAACP, said of Senator Sessions: Senator 
Sessions' record throughout his career, whether in the Office of the 
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, as attorney general 
of the State of Alabama or, most recently, as the junior U.S. Senator 
from Alabama evinces a clear disregard, disrespect, and even disdain 
for the civil and human rights of racial and ethnic minorities, women, 
the disabled, and others who suffer from discrimination in this 
country--a damning indictment.
  Apparently, he doesn't stay in contact with the NAACP chapter in 
Alabama. In 2009, the NAACP gave Jeff Sessions--Civic and Human Rights 
Convention, April 23 to 26, 2009, NAACP Governmental Award of 
Excellence, Senator Jeff Sessions: For the outstanding work you do.
  That is one of the awards he forgot to tell us about, so I hope he 
will amend. Another attack on Senator Sessions, he received an award 
from a David Horowitz group that was labeled by the Senator from 
Connecticut as being some rightwing extremist organization. All I can 
say is that the Annie Taylor Award is named for a lady who went over 
Niagara Falls in a barrel. They give it to conservatives who stood up 
under difficult circumstances. I actually received the award as an 
impeachment manager. Chris Matthews was there to moderate the dinner. 
So I don't know what Mr. Horowitz said after I was there, before he was 
there; all I can say is that I received the award, too, and I sure as 
hell don't consider myself a bigot.
  Voting against the Violence Against Women Act authored by Senator 
Leahy--I won't give you a long rendition. I voted against it, too, for 
reasons I will be glad to explain to you at a later time.
  The bottom line here is that most of the things said about Jeff 
Sessions and the way he acted as a Senator could be said about almost 
all of us on this side who consider ourselves conservative.
  Back to our friends at the NAACP, I asked Mr. Brooks, ``Do you have a 
legislative scorecard how you rate people in the Body?'' He said, 
``Yes. And Senator Sessions has been historically low rated.''
  Here is what I want the body to know: that in the report card of the 
113th Congress, the first half, here are the ratings. Senator 
Grassley--all Republicans here, 11 percent; Hatch, 25 percent; Graham, 
25 percent; Cornyn, 11 percent; Lee, 11 percent; Cruz, 11 percent; 
Sasse, he wasn't in Congress; Blake, 29 percent; Crapo, 14 percent; 
Tillis and Kennedy were not rated yet. On the Democratic side of the 
Judiciary Committee, Feinstein, 100 percent; Leahy, 100 percent; 
Whitehouse, 100 percent; Klobuchar, 100 percent; Franken, 100 percent; 
Coons, 96 percent; Blumenthal, 100 percent; Hirono, 100 percent. Not 
only did Jeff Sessions have a poor rating, all of us did.
  So to my friends on the other side, you are making arguments that I 
don't think are good for the future of this body and the country as a 
whole. You are basically saying: You did not vote for the legislation I 
supported. You voted against ideas I embrace that I think make America 
a unique place; therefore, you cannot have this job.

[[Page 2018]]

  Here is what I would say: Senator Sessions voted as a very 
conservative Senator from the State of Alabama who has conducted 
himself honorably his entire life. And I really regret that we have 
gotten to this point. All of us in here know Jeff, and I have been on 
this floor fighting with him tooth and nail about immigration reform. I 
worked with Senator Durbin, who is going to speak next, and our chief 
antagonist most of the time was Senator Sessions. Never in my darkest 
day will I ever believe Jeff Sessions said one word on this floor that 
he did not truly believe. And he reflects the views of millions of 
Americans.
  As to the status of the LGBT community, I think Jeff Sessions was 
representing the values of his State. And all I can say is, that is 
what we are sent up here to do. If we disagree, we disagree, but it is 
a big leap from the policy disagreement to not qualified.
  I asked the NAACP chairman: Name one Republican you would recommend 
to be Attorney General.
  I have yet to get a name.
  So what we are talking about here, unfortunately, is an attack on 
conservatism more than it is Jeff Sessions because almost everything 
said about Jeff could be said about me and most of my colleagues over 
here. Why did I vote for Holder? Why did I vote for Lynch? Why did I 
vote for Sotomayor and Hagel? And the list goes on and on and on.
  I expect that when a liberal President wins, they will pick people 
who are qualified, who share their view to represent their 
administration. When it comes to the Attorney General, you can be 
liberal and you can be conservative, but you also still can be fair to 
the public as a whole.
  I don't believe for 1 second that Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General 
of the United States, will take any of his political positions and jam 
them down your throat if the law says no. I have never seen that about 
the man.
  The minority leader of the Alabama Senate, Senator Ross, an African-
American Democratic minority leader, said:

       I have worked with Jeff Sessions. I know him personally, 
     and all of my encounters with him have been for the greater 
     good of Alabama. We have spoken about everything, from civil 
     rights to race relations. We agree that as Christian men, our 
     hearts and minds focus on doing right by all people.

  That is the Jeff Sessions I know. That is why I am lending my support 
to his nomination.
  I have some serious differences with President Trump, and those 
differences will materialize over time. And I hope I have the courage 
of my convictions to stand up for what I believe even when my party has 
the White House. That is a very hard thing to do for all of us. I 
intend to do it to the best of my ability, and I will get a lot of 
coverage for doing that because that makes for good political 
reporting. But what will not be covered is the fact that on the really 
big issues, mostly, I agree with President Trump and Jeff Sessions 
about what we need to do to change the dynamic regarding crime. I will 
work with Senator Durbin to bring about sentencing reform, but it is 
now time to go in on the offense against crime.
  One of the things that pleases me most about this nomination of 
Senator Sessions is that we have been very strong allies in fighting 
the War on Terror. Jeff Sessions understands the difference between 
fighting a crime and fighting a war. It will be welcome news for me to 
have an Attorney General who understands that Bin Laden's son-in-law 
who is captured on the battlefield should be treated differently than 
somebody who tried to steal your car. Under Jeff Sessions, the Justice 
Department will look at enemy combatants for who they are--warriors in 
a cause to destroy our lives--and they will be held consistent with the 
law of war, not domestic criminal law. And the days of terrorists being 
read the Miranda rights as if they were common criminals will soon be 
over. That will make us all safer.
  I look forward to voting for Senator Sessions and working with him. 
And if we have disagreements, the one thing I know for sure is that 
Jeff will at least listen to me.
  This body is adrift. The country is really divided. I hope that once 
this confirmation process is over, we can get back to doing the 
business of the American people.
  To the extent that Donald Trump becomes the problem, we will push 
back. Right now, people are pushing back against everything all the 
time, and you are going to hurt yourself, as well as this body, because 
there is no way you can ever convince me that Jeff Sessions is not 
qualified to be the Attorney General. I can understand why you wouldn't 
pick him, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is somebody a 
Republican conservative President would pick, and they did.
  I yield the floor
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sasse). The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Illinois for his 
courtesy. I think this will take about 7 or 8 minutes, I would say to 
my colleague from Illinois.
  I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                     Tribute to Vladimir Kara-Murza

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, last week I was heartbroken to learn that 
a dear friend and great fighter for freedom, Vladimir Kara-Murza, had 
been hospitalized in Moscow. Those of us who know the work of this 
brave Russian patriot could not afford to hope or assume that he was 
suffering some ordinary illness. Just 2 years ago, under mysterious 
circumstances, Vladimir grew very ill and fell into a coma.
  Many suspected he was poisoned, to intimidate him or worse. That is 
why last week's news signaled another shadowy strike against a 
brilliant voice who has defied the tyranny of Putin's Russia.
  Many Americans are not familiar with the life of Vladimir Kara-Murza, 
but it is one that reflects the best qualities of leadership, courage, 
selflessness, idealism and patriotism, and it is a life dedicated to 
the principles we all hold dear: truth and justice, freedom and 
fairness, human rights and human dignity.
  All his life, Vladimir has been a brave, outspoken, and relentless 
champion for the Russian people. He is a deputy leader of the People's 
Freedom Party, Russia's leading pro-democracy party. He is a leading 
coordinator of Open Russia, a foundation that promotes civil society 
and democracy in Russia. In 2011, he helped mobilize the largest anti-
Kremlin demonstration since the early 1990s, leading tens of thousands 
of Russians to march in protest of widespread fraud and corruption in 
the parliamentary elections.
  In the United States, Vladimir was one of the most passionate and 
effective advocates for passage of the Magnitsky Act, legislation that 
gives the Federal Government powers to punish human rights violators in 
Russia. Most recently he has eloquently and persuasively campaigned to 
expand the Act to impose sanctions on those Russians journalists who 
were so cowed and corrupted by the Kremlin that they become 
indispensable to propagating the lies and atmosphere of hate, fear, and 
violence the Putin regime relies on to maintain power.
  Vladimir's family has a long history of heroism for years, dating 
back to the early 1900s. Vladimir once described the experience of 
visiting the KGB archives in Moscow where he reviewed the thin file on 
his great grandfather who was executed. It contained the scant evidence 
required for a death sentence in Stalin's Russia. He recalled the 
weight that fell upon him when he read the modest document to which the 
executioners affixed the date and their signatures to signify that the 
judgment had been carried out.
  Vladimir also learned what it takes to be a revolutionary from our 
mutual friend Boris Nemtsov. Vladimir and Boris struggled together for 
years in the cause of freedom and democracy. Vladimir once called Boris 
the best President Russia never had.
  Boris was one of the first to warn of the incoming Putin 
dictatorship, even when many of his fellow liberals could not see it. 
He told the truth about Putin's reign of terror, rampant corruption, 
and his illegal invasion of

[[Page 2019]]

Ukraine. For the crime of telling the truth in Putin's Russia, Boris 
Nemtsov was murdered in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015.
  He died a martyr. He died a martyr for the rights of people who were 
taught to hate him but who will one day mourn his death, revere his 
memory, and despise his murderers. After Boris's assassination, many 
urged Vladimir not to return to Russia. He had every reason not to. He 
knew his own family's history with tyranny. He knew what happened to 
Boris Nemtsov, and he knew all too well about the culture of impunity 
that Putin has created in Russia, where individuals are routinely 
persecuted and attacked for their beliefs, including by the Russian 
Government, and no one is ever held responsible.
  He knew about Sergei Yushenkov, who was investigating the Kremlin's 
potential role in the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia when he was 
shot and killed at the entrance of his apartment. He knew about 
American journalist Paul Klebnikov, who was investigating Russian 
Government connections to organized crime when he was shot to death in 
Moscow in 2004.
  He knew about Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist, human rights 
activist, and fierce critic of Putin's brutal war in Chechnya, who was 
murdered in the stairwell of her apartment building on Putin's birthday 
in 2006.
  He knew about former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who exposed 
the Putin regime's massive corruption tied to organized crime and 
involving assassination and murder. He was poisoned to death in 2006 
with a radioactive isotype in a brazen act of nuclear terrorism.
  He knew about Sergei Magnitsky, that most unlikely of heroes in the 
cause of freedom, the humble tax attorney who blew the whistle on tax 
fraud and large-scale theft by Russian Government officials, only to be 
charged with their crimes and die in a squalid cell inside the prison 
that once held the political opponents of the Czars and the Soviets.
  In short, Vladimir knew that Putin is a killer--and he is a killer. 
He might very well be the next target. Vladimir knew that there was no 
moral equivalence between the United States and Putin's Russia. I 
repeat: There is no moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and 
KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald 
Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill. To allege some kind of 
moral equivalence between the two is either terribly misinformed or 
incredibly biased. Neither can be accurate in any way.
  Knowing all this, knowing that his life was at risk, Vladimir 
returned to Russia. He continued to speak truth to power. He kept faith 
with his ideals and was in confrontation with a cruel and dangerous 
autocracy. He kept faith honorably and bravely with the example of his 
friend and comrade Boris Nemtsov.
  Now it appears that Vladimir has once again paid the price for his 
gallantry and integrity, for placing the interests of the Russian 
people before his own self-interest. He is very ill, but I am 
encouraged to learn his condition is now stable.
  So today, speaking for so many Americans, I offer my most heartfelt 
prayers for the recovery of Vladimir Kara-Murza and for the success of 
the cause to which he has dedicated his life: truth and justice for the 
Russian people. And I do so with the confidence Vladimir himself once 
expressed: ``I am sure that in the end, we will win, because even when 
dictators prevail for some time, sooner or later, freedom wins.''
  I thank my colleague from Illinois for his indulgence.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, let me say at the outset that I am glad I 
was here for the statement made by the Senator from South Carolina. We 
disagree on many things. We agree on things as well. I respect him very 
much and turn to him often to find bipartisan support when, frankly, no 
one else will answer the phone. He has been a great friend and ally and 
has been very blunt with me when we disagree. We do disagree today, and 
I do it respectfully because Senator Graham is a person I do, in fact, 
respect as a Senate colleague.
  He is right about one thing: You would expect a new President to pick 
someone to be an Attorney General whom they know and trust. It might 
have even been someone from the campaign trail.
  A classic example is 1960, when President John Kennedy was elected 
and chose his brother Robert Kennedy, who had worked on his campaign, 
to serve as Attorney General of the United States. You can't think of a 
clearer analogy to what has been described today. But the point that 
was made earlier by Senator Feinstein about the relationship of Senator 
Sessions with Candidate Trump is one that goes beyond familiarity, 
beyond support in a political campaign. In fact, they did work 
together, and they do agree on some fundamental issues.
  If the press can be trusted--and the White House is the first to tell 
us they can't--but if the press can be trusted, in a Washington Post 
article of January 31, 2017, we see a very clear working relationship 
that extends beyond the would-be Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the 
new President Donald Trump but includes a former key staffer for 
Senator Sessions, Steve Miller, and a man named Steve Bannon, who is 
with Breitbart News and is now a political inspiration to the Trump 
White House. It appears that they have a very close working 
relationship among them. That in and of itself is not troubling, except 
when you look at the issues they have worked on closely together--the 
issue of immigration, the Executive orders, of which the Post said 
Senator Sessions was the ``intellectual godfather.'' That is a clear 
example pointed out by this article, and that is one of the reasons it 
was raised by Senator Feinstein.
  I understand what Senator Graham has to say: that Senator Sessions 
has been nothing more than a Senator loyal to his home State of Alabama 
in his politics and in his views on issues. I do acknowledge that and 
can tell you that, over 20 years, I have heard Senator Sessions's 
speeches repeatedly, and he does take those positions. But the thing 
that troubles me is the question about whether the values of the 
Senator from Alabama are the values we want in the Attorney General of 
the United States. To be very blunt, in some cases, they are not, as 
far as I am concerned.
  I understand that President Trump won the election, but that doesn't 
mean, when it comes to advice and consent, that every Member of the 
Senate has to bow and step back a few steps for every nominee proposed 
by this new President. We have a responsibility to ask what is right 
for America, what is right in terms of values and judgments that we 
bring to this job, as well.
  It is not a happy moment for me to say this, but I do stand in 
opposition to the nomination of Jeff Sessions to serve as Attorney 
General of the United States. The reason I don't view this as a happy 
moment is I have known him for 20 years. We have worked in the Senate, 
in committees, and on the floor. I know him personally. I met his 
family. And to say that I don't support him for this elevation to 
Attorney General is something that is hard to say, but I know that I 
have to. This is not a decision I have come to lightly. Senator 
Sessions is a colleague of over 20 years. But the question we now face 
is whether he is the right person to be the No. 1 law enforcement 
official in the United States of America.
  He comes to this new opportunity in a sharply divided nation. We have 
a controversial new President who already has seen an Executive order 
blocked by the courts in what appears to be record time. Think about 
that for a moment. Donald Trump has been President of the United States 
for 19 days. In those 19 days, he has issued an Executive order stopped 
by the Federal courts of the land from implementation and he has 
dismissed an Attorney General. No other new President, in 19 days, can 
point to that happening. It is an indication of the types of policies 
he

[[Page 2020]]

is promoting. It is also an indication that in the future, he is likely 
to again test the separation of powers in this government.
  In this context, the need for an independent Attorney General has 
never been greater. We need an Attorney General who will not just serve 
as the President's lawyer or cheerleader but who will defend the 
constitutional rights of everyone, including protecting those rights 
from an overreaching President, if necessary. As a member of the 
Judiciary Committee, I have carefully considered this nomination, and I 
am not persuaded that Senator Sessions will serve that level of 
independence.
  Also, I have strong concerns that, if he is confirmed, he won't 
adequately pursue the cause of justice on a range of important issues. 
In his nomination hearing, Senator Sessions said on issue after issue 
that he would simply follow the law, enforce the law, but that doesn't 
come close to capturing the real role of the Attorney General. The 
Attorney General, as chief prosecutor in America, doesn't just ``follow 
the law''; that person uses his discretion to determine how the law is 
enforced and whom it is enforced against. Ignoring that is to ignore 
one of the key elements of service as Attorney General.
  As Acting Attorney General Sally Yates reminded us, the Attorney 
General has a critical role at times in even standing up to the 
President. The American Bar Association standards say that the duty of 
the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict. I don't have 
confidence, based on the answers he has given me, that Senator Sessions 
would follow that standard.
  Here is one example. At the hearing, I introduced Senator Sessions to 
Alton Mills of Chicago, who in his youth was a street-level courier for 
drug dealers. He was sentenced to life without parole and prison at age 
24--life without parole at age 24 under the Federal three strikes and 
you are out law. He was sentenced on a nonviolent drug offense--no 
guns, no violence. He sold drugs a third time and got a life sentence.
  Even the judge imposing the sentence did not agree with it, but he 
said the law said what he had to follow and his hands were tied. Alton 
Mills needed to pay for his mistakes, but he did not need to spend the 
rest of his life in prison. In December 2015, President Obama commuted 
Alton's sentence, after he had served 22 years in prison.
  Under the Obama administration, Justice Department prosecutors were 
directed to search out low-level offenders like Alton Mills and use the 
discretion of the Department of Justice and make sure that they were 
given a second chance. Senator Sessions has said that he strongly 
opposes these guidelines.
  When it came to clemency, Senator Sessions fiercely criticized 
President Obama, saying he commuted sentences in ``an unprecedented 
reckless manner.'' Senator Sessions also said: ``So-called low-level 
non-violent offenders simply do not exist in the Federal system.''
  When it came to changing the law that led to Alton Mills sentence, 
Senator Sessions led the opposition. I appreciate the work we did 
together on the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. But every time I have 
returned to Senator Sessions and asked him to work with me for the 
thousands still stuck in Federal prison for nonviolent drug offenses 
under the old sentencing disparities which we have now rejected, he 
refused, time and again. He has opposed every bipartisan effort, 
including a bill that I put together with Senator Grassley, Senator 
Cornyn, and others to allow individuals to petition on an individual 
basis for sentence reductions.
  So to sum it up, Senator Sessions has staunchly opposed using 
prosecutorial discretion, clemency, or legislation to address the 
plight of thousands of people like Alton Mills. What can we expect of 
Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the next 4 years when it comes to 
criminal justice and criminal sentencing reform? I am afraid we can't 
expect a caring person to take a look at the simple injustice in our 
system.
  I have listened. time and again, as many other colleagues have, to 
the statements made by Senator Sessions on the issue of immigration. I 
have said before on this floor--and I will say it again--that I am the 
proud son of an immigrant. For generations. America has been renewed 
and enriched through immigration. Since World War II, we have set an 
example to the world when it comes to providing a safe haven for 
refugees.
  We have four Hispanic Senators in this Chamber. Three of them are 
Cuban Americans. What can we say about the Cuban refugees who came to 
the United States by the hundreds of thousands to flee the oppression 
of Castro? They were not subjected to extreme vetting. In most cases, 
we said: If you can find freedom in this country you are welcome. They 
have made America a better nation for it.
  Since World War II, that has been America's standard. Now it is being 
challenged. It is hard to understand how the Trump administration could 
consider spending so much on a Mexican wall that Texas Republican 
Congressman Will Hurd, whose district covers 800 miles of the southwest 
border, described as ``the most expensive and least effective way to 
secure the border.''
  I have come to this floor and voted for more money for walls and 
obstacles and technology on that border than I ever imagined necessary, 
in the hopes that we could finally put to rest this notion that we 
could always do more. I wonder what image it creates of this country, 
as we continue to talk about walls and banning travel.
  President Trump signed an Executive order on January 27 banning 
immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, and banning refugees 
from those countries into the United States. As I go through the list 
of the people who were affected by this, overwhelmingly they are women 
and children, victims of war, terrorism, and persecution. Many of them 
have been waiting literally for years to come to the United States. 
Since World War II, we have accepted so many refugees from Eastern 
Europe, from Vietnam, from Cuba, as I mentioned earlier, and from 
Yugoslavia. Over 100,000 Soviet Jews make their home in the United 
States because we accepted them as refugees.
  Now President Trump has issued this Executive order that is being 
challenged in court, and we will know within a matter of days whether 
it will be stayed or continued, contested or if it will stand as law. 
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates said that she could not stand to 
defend that order. She felt it was illegal and unconstitutional.
  The question, obviously, is what would the new Attorney General, if 
it is Jeff Sessions do, when faced with that same challenge? My fear is 
that he would not stand in independent judgment of the actions of the 
President. That to me is unfortunate and falls short of what we expect 
from the Attorney General.
  We need someone like Edward Levi, the longtime president of the 
University of Chicago, who served as a truly nonpartisan Attorney 
General under President Ford. He restored honor and integrity to the 
Justice Department after Watergate. Where would Senator Sessions stand 
once confirmed? Would he defend the President's Executive orders? Would 
he stand up to the President if he disagreed with him? I have strong 
concerns.
  Mr. President, one of the most important issues when it comes to the 
Attorney General is the oversight of the Civil Rights Division, which 
is, in fact, the crown jewel of the Justice Department, as far as I am 
concerned. It is responsible for protecting the civil rights of all 
Americans.
  Senator Cory Booker and Congressmen John Lewis and Cedric Richmond 
gave powerful testimony at Senator Sessions' hearing. They discussed 
their concerns about the Justice Department under his leadership and 
whether it would protect the civil and voting rights of all Americans. 
I took their words to heart. I want to talk specifically about their 
concerns about the Voting Rights Act.
  One month from now, we will recognize the 52nd anniversary of what 
came to be known as Bloody Sunday--March 7, 1965. John Lewis and Rev. 
Hosea Williams led 600 brave civil rights activists

[[Page 2021]]

in a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. The marchers 
were brutally beaten as State troopers turned them back and chased them 
down. John Lewis was beaten unconscious and nearly killed.
  A few months after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson signed the 
Voting Rights Act into law, guaranteeing that the right to vote would 
not be restricted through clever schemes like poll taxes and literacy 
tests devised to keep African Americans from voting.
  In 2006, Congress voted to reauthorize that same act after holding 21 
hearings, hearing testimony from more than 90 witnesses, and receiving 
15,000 pages of evidence.
  Congressman Lewis said in an op-ed about the ongoing need for that 
act:

       Congress came to a near-unanimous conclusion: While some 
     change has occurred, the places with a legacy of long-
     standing, entrenched and state-sponsored voting 
     discrimination still have the most persistent, flagrant, 
     contemporary records of discrimination in this country. While 
     the 16 jurisdictions affected by Section 5 represent only 25 
     percent of the nation's population, they still represent more 
     than 80 percent of the lawsuits proving cases of voting 
     discrimination.

  While Senator Sessions ultimately voted to reauthorize the Voting 
Rights Act, his comments about the law have been very troubling.
  In contrast to Congressman Lewis's statement about the need for a 
strong Voting Rights Act, Senator Sessions repeatedly criticized the 
law's section 5 preclearance provision, which required certain 
jurisdictions--including, but not limited to, Alabama--to ``preclear'' 
any changes to their voting laws with the Department of Justice. At his 
nomination hearing last month, Senator Sessions reiterated his view 
that section 5 of the law, in his words, was ``intrusive.''
  He also celebrated the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. 
Holder when a divided Court--5 to 4--gutted the Voting Rights Act and 
struck down the preclearance provision. That decision left the 
Department of Justice with fewer tools to protect Americans' right to 
vote. Nonetheless, on the day of that awful decision, Senator Sessions 
stated: ``[The decision was] good news, I think, for the South, in that 
[there was] not sufficient evidence to justify treating them 
disproportionately.'' Senator Sessions was wrong to dismiss the vital 
role that preclearance has played in protecting voters from 
discriminatory laws.
  When Senator Sessions came to my office for a personal meeting before 
this hearing began, I sat down with him and talked about the Voting 
Rights Act. I gave to him a book written by Carol Anderson. She is a 
political science professor at Emory University in the State of 
Georgia. The book is entitled ``White Rage.'' Carol Anderson 
systematically goes through the history of race in America after the 
Civil War, and she points out in each section how Congress would, on 
one hand, give rights to African Americans and then turn around and 
take them away. The most recent example relates to the Voting Rights 
Act itself and all the efforts of the 1960s to guarantee that 
minorities had the right to vote in America. She follows it with the 
undeniable record of efforts toward voter suppression when it comes to 
minorities in the United States.
  I pointed this out to Senator Sessions because he has been in denial 
over this reality. I told him about hearings that we held in Ohio, in 
Florida, taking election officials, putting them under oath--officials 
from both political parties--and asking them point blank: Before you 
established the need for these voting restrictions in your State, what 
was the incidence of widespread voter fraud that led you to believe it 
was necessary? And the answer repeatedly was, there was none. No 
incidents of widespread voter fraud to speak of. No incidents of 
anything substantial when it came to prosecution. Clearly the motive 
behind these voter suppression laws are just that--to suppress voters 
from their opportunity to vote.
  What can we expect of Attorney General Sessions on this issue? I am 
afraid, based on his statements, his record, his voting, we can expect 
the worst.
  Example: A three-judge Federal appeals court struck down a North 
Carolina law that required voter ID and limited early voting. The court 
found that the law was crafted and passed with ``racially 
discriminatory intent,'' in violation of the Constitution and section 2 
of the Voting Rights Act. In the decision, this Federal court noted 
this regarding the North Carolina statute:

       Before enacting [the] law, the legislature requested data 
     on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon 
     receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted 
     legislation that restricted voting and registration in five 
     different ways, all of which disproportionately affected 
     African Americans.

  We are still facing this challenge in America. I wish it were not the 
case. I had hoped at this point in my life that I would be pointing to 
our problems with race as something from the past, but it is a current 
challenge we face, and it is a challenge the Attorney General must face 
squarely. I do not believe that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will do 
that, and that is why I can't support him for that position.
  Of course there is also Senator Sessions' decision as U.S. attorney 
to bring the 1985 Perry County case when he was in Alabama. He 
prosecuted three African-American civil rights activists for voter 
fraud. All three were acquitted. That case prompted former 
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who was an attorney for the 
defendants, to send a letter to members of our committee saying, ``To 
use prosecutorial discretion to attempt to criminalize voter assistance 
is wrong and should be disqualifying for any aspirant to the Nation's 
highest law enforcement post.''
  Senator Sessions' statements and his records are particularly 
concerning in light of President Trump's recent repeated, baseless 
claims about voter fraud in the 2016 Presidential election. Make no 
mistake--President Trump's false claim that there were millions of 
fraudulent votes cast in the last election is an excuse for further 
voter suppression efforts.
  It is imperative that the Department of Justice be led by someone who 
values the vital role the Department plays in protecting the right to 
vote. Given Senator Sessions' dismissive comments about the Voting 
Rights Act and his history of supporting burdensome voting laws, I am 
not confident he is prepared to do that.
  Senator Sessions' record on religious freedom also raises significant 
questions. The free exercise of religion is enshrined in the First 
Amendment of the Constitution. However, Senator Sessions has only been 
outspoken in his defense of religious freedom for some faiths. For 
example, he denounced a 1997 court order that limited prayer in Alabama 
public schools, calling it ``one more example of the effort by the 
courts to eliminate the natural expression of religious belief from 
public life.''
  A year later, he introduced a Senate resolution ``affirming the right 
to display the Ten Commandments in public places, including government 
offices and courthouses.'' He said ``[w]e've got to end the hostility 
toward the display of the Ten Commandments in public places.''
  But he has been much more ambivalent about Islam. He has referred to 
Islam as ``a toxic ideology'' and said of American Muslims ``our nation 
has an unprecedented assimilation problem.'' When President Trump first 
proposed his ban on Muslim immigrants during the 2016 campaign, Senator 
Sessions said, ``I think it's appropriate to begin to discuss this, and 
he has forced that discussion.''
  I am also concerned about Senator Sessions' support of laws and cases 
that permit individuals and companies to discriminate against other 
Americans on the basis of religious beliefs. For example, in 2015, the 
Supreme Court held that marriage equality is the law of the land in the 
landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Sessions referred to the 
decision as an:

     effort to secularize, by force and intimidation, a society 
     that would not exist but for the faith which inspired people 
     to sail across unknown waters and trek across unknown 
     frontiers.


[[Page 2022]]


  After disparaging the decision, Senator Sessions went on to cosponsor 
the First Amendment Defense Act, which would permit widespread 
discrimination against LGBTQ individuals on the basis of religious 
beliefs.
  Senator Sessions also praised the Supreme Court's troubling 5-4 
decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which held that the Religious 
Freedom Restoration Act permits closely held, for-profit corporations 
to deny contraceptive coverage to employees due to religious 
objections.
  If confirmed to be the next Attorney General, Senator Sessions will 
be responsible for protecting the rights of all Americans, regardless 
of their faith or beliefs. That is why I am deeply concerned about 
Senator Sessions' record, which suggests that he may prioritize the 
freedom of certain faiths over others, and permit religious freedom to 
be used as a guise for discrimination.
  The Attorney General also has great power to determine how the 
Department of Justice's resources will be prioritized. I am alarmed 
that Senator Sessions will not commit to support funding for important 
programs like COPS and Byrne-JAG. And I am deeply disappointed that he 
will not commit to increase Justice Department resources for Chicago to 
address the city's surge in gun violence.
  I asked Senator Sessions about this when we met in person before his 
hearing and again as part of my written hearing questions. It is well 
known that there's been an epidemic of gun violence facing the City of 
Chicago. There were more than 760 homicides in Chicago last year, a 58 
percent increase over the previous year. More than 4,300 people were 
shot last year in the city. It is a crisis.
  At our meeting, I handed Senator Sessions a copy of Mayor Emanuel's 
plan to improve public safety. The plan calls for hiring nearly a 
thousand more Chicago police; more training and equipment, like body-
worn cameras and gunshot detection technology; more mentoring programs 
for youth; and reforms to rebuild trust and cooperation between police 
and the community.
  All of these are areas where the Justice Department can, and must, 
help. The Justice Department's COPS program helps local police 
departments put more cops on the beat. The Byrne-JAG program helps them 
buy equipment. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 
Prevention provides mentoring and violence prevention funds. And the 
Civil Rights Division was invited in by me, the mayor, and the state 
Attorney General to review the Chicago Police Department's practices. 
On January 13, they reached an agreement in principle with the City to 
pursue much-needed reforms and to seek to enforce the reforms through a 
consent decree.
  I asked Senator Sessions about his support for these efforts, 
especially in light of President Trump's tweets where he has urged 
Mayor Emanuel to ask for Federal help--even though the Mayor has 
already asked for aid--and threatened to ``send in the Feds'' to 
Chicago. But Senator Sessions has steadfastly refused to make any 
commitment of Justice Department resources to help reduce Chicago's 
violence. He refused to commit to increase Justice Department funding 
for Chicago. He wouldn't even commit not to cut funding. He refused to 
commit to honor the agreement in Principle that the Justice Department 
signed with the city to reform the Chicago Police Department.
  And he refused to commit not to request budget cuts to the COPS and 
Byrne-JAG programs and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 
Prevention.
  This is unfathomable to me. Now is not the time for the Justice 
Department to turn its back on the City of Chicago and its people. It 
is hard to understand how the Trump administration could think about 
spending $15 billion on an inexpensive and ineffective wall and not 
commit to spend another penny to address gun violence in Chicago. If 
the administration took just 1 percent of what they want for a border 
wall and used it to help Chicago implement the mayor's public safety 
plan with more police, training, and youth job programs, we could save 
a lot of lives. But instead Senator Sessions and the Trump 
administration are threatening to cut Federal funds for Chicago. Their 
priorities are profoundly misplaced.
  Senator Sessions did say he would increase Federal gun prosecutions. 
That may be helpful, but it is not enough to reduce gun violence. The 
Chicago Sun-Times looked at Federal gun prosecutions over the past 5 
years and found that cities like Detroit and Baltimore had 
significantly more than Chicago, but their per-capita homicide rates 
are still higher that Chicago's. So that is not enough.
  Senator Sessions also seems to think that immigrants are at the root 
of most of our Nation's crime problems. That is why he pushes to 
withhold critical Federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities. But 
many studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit 
serious crimes than native-born individuals. And there is no evidence 
whatsoever that undocumented immigrants are responsible for any 
significant proportion of the murders in Chicago. If sanctuary cities 
are the problem, why did a sanctuary city like New York City experience 
record low crime in 2016? Senator Sessions' priorities when it comes to 
these issues does not give me confidence.
  I am also troubled by the casual approach that Senator Sessions has 
adopted when it comes to Russian interference in our Presidential 
election.
  Election Day 2016 is a day that will live in cyber infamy. A foreign 
adversary intentionally manipulated America's Presidential election. 
Amid warnings of Russian manipulation going back to early October, 
President Donald Trump not only resisted these findings, he has praised 
Russian President Vladimir Putin and dismissed the true nature of Putin 
and his threat. As early as July of last year, then-candidate Trump 
urged a foreign adversary of the United States to conduct espionage 
against Hillary Clinton. He said, ``I will tell you this, Russia: If 
you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are 
missing . . . I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our 
press.'' And President Trump, who has impulsively attacked just about 
anyone who criticizes him, has not criticized the one person who is 
guilty of sponsoring this cyber attack: Vladimir Putin.
  This is bigger than one election or one person. This is about our 
national security, and we should take it seriously.
  For those who have been following Putin's actions over the last 
several years, this attack should come as no surprise. Russia has 
conducted cyber warfare against Ukraine, the Netherlands, Georgia, 
Lithuania, Estonia, and a host of other nations. Russia now appears 
focused on disrupting the upcoming German elections over Putin's 
dislike of Chancellor Merkel. And it could happen again here.
  We need to know that the next U.S. Attorney General will take this 
matter seriously as well and will be independent of the White House. 
This means allowing career Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI 
to follow the facts and the law.
  I am concerned about Senator Sessions when it comes to this 
assignment. I asked Senator Sessions questions about this. In his 
written responses, he admitted that he has not even read the January 6 
intelligence community assessment on Russian involvement in the U.S. 
election--neither the classified nor the unclassified version. As 
recently as last week, Senator Sessions admitted he still has not read 
this report.
  The unclassified version incidentally is just a few pages if you 
don't count the annexes. I read it in less than 15 minutes.
  Senator Sessions, seeking to be the top law enforcement official in 
the land, should have found time to read this report. His failure to do 
so is inexplicable. This does not give me confidence that Senator 
Sessions is giving this matter the attention it deserves.
  I also asked Senator Sessions if he would commit not to impede or 
terminate ongoing Justice Department or FBI investigations into Russian 
involvement in the 2016 election. He

[[Page 2023]]

would not make any commitment about allowing investigations to continue 
if confirmed.
  And I asked Senator Sessions if he would recuse himself from any FBI 
or DOJ investigation into Russian efforts to influence the election. He 
said he was not aware of a basis to recuse himself.
  Well, Department of Justice regulations call for recusals from 
investigations due to personal or political relationships. And it is 
clear that Senator Sessions has a close relationship with President 
Trump, including on Russia issues. Senator Sessions was a prominent 
supporter of the President's campaign.
  On March 3, 2016, then-candidate Trump announced that Sessions would 
serve as chairman of Mr. Trump's National Security Advisory Committee 
and that he would ``provide strategic counsel to Mr. Trump on foreign 
policy and homeland security.''
  In a July 31, 2016 interview with CNN, Senator Sessions stated the 
following:

       What I want to tell you is that Hillary Clinton left her 
     email system totally vulnerable to a Russian penetration. 
     It's probably clear that they have what was on that system. I 
     have people come up to me all the time and say, why don't 
     you--if you want to find out where those 30,000 emails are, 
     why don't you ask the Russians? They're the ones that have 
     them . . . The big issue is, can we, should we be able to 
     create a new and positive relationship with Russia. I think 
     it's . . . it makes no sense that we're at the hostility 
     level we are.

  On August 15, 2016, USA Today published an article entitled ``Sen. 
Jeff Sessions backs Donald Trump on Russia Policy'' detailing how 
Sessions changed his hawkish position on Russia to align with then-
candidate Trump's statements. It said:

       ``Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has long supported increased 
     military spending and tough talk about the threat Russia 
     poses to the U.S. and its allies in Europe. Since becoming an 
     adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, 
     however, those principles appear to have undergone some 
     revisions. Trump has upended traditional conservative caution 
     toward Russia by exchanging niceties with President Vladimir 
     Putin and expressing hope for warmer relations. And Sessions, 
     a frequent surrogate for the Trump campaign in public 
     appearances, is nodding in agreement.''

  On October 7, 2016, Politico published a story entitled ``Lobbyist 
advised Trump campaign while promoting Russian pipeline: Richard Burt 
helped shape the candidate's first foreign-policy speech while lobbying 
on behalf of a Moscow-controlled gas company.'' The Politico story 
noted that the lobbyist in question ``attended two dinners this summer 
hosted by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been named chairman of 
Trump's national security committee'' and that the lobbyist ``was 
invited to discuss issues of national security and foreign policy, and 
wrote white papers for Sessions on the same subjects . . . ''
  In an October 30 interview with DefenseNews, Senator Sessions said, 
``The United States and Russia should be able to be far more harmonious 
than we are today.''
  Clearly, an investigation into the reported Russia-Trump allegations 
has the potential to significantly impact the interests of Senator 
Sessions' soon-to-be-boss, if he's confirmed, and his close political 
ally.
  Again, Senator Sessions' answers to my questions do not give me 
confidence. In the end, the American people deserve the truth about 
Russian involvement in our election. The stakes too high to ignore.
  There are other aspects of Senator Sessions' record that give me 
serious concerns about what his priorities would be if confirmed as 
Attorney General, including his vote against reauthorizing the Violence 
Against Women Act; his votes against the Detainee Treatment Act and the 
McCain-Feinstein Army Field Manual Amendment; his past statement that 
the use of prison chain gangs was ``perfectly proper''; his opposition 
to laws such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes 
Prevention Act; his questioning of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of 
birthright citizenship; and his refusal to commit to recuse himself 
from involvement in any case, investigation or Office of Legal Counsel 
decision involving the receipt of emoluments by President Trump. All of 
these factors have weighed on me as I have considered this nomination
  Mr. President, let me conclude.
  We need a nonpartisan Attorney General with the independence, 
judgment, and backbone to stand up to a President when his actions are 
illegal or unjust. Senator Sessions is an able politician. He has been 
an able representative of his State of Alabama. But he is not the right 
person to serve as Donald Trump's Attorney General.
  The Justice Department's motto ``qui pro domina justitia sequitur'' 
refers to an Attorney General ``who prosecutes on behalf of justice.'' 
Based on his record and his responses to questions over the past few 
weeks, I am not confident Senator Sessions would be such an Attorney 
General. I cannot support his nomination, and I will vote against him.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, this week we have to decide whether Senator 
Sessions, somebody whom many of us have known and worked with for many 
years--I certainly have during all of the time he has been in the 
Senate--is the right person to lead the Department of Justice. I 
thought long and hard on it. I decided he is not. I would like to share 
a few reasons why.
  In fact, the Trump administration itself underscored what is at stake 
with this nomination. When the administration accused Acting Attorney 
General Sally Yates of having ``betrayed the Department of Justice,'' 
it exposed a view of the Justice Department that is disturbing and 
dangerous. The claim that Ms. Yates ``betrayed'' the Department by 
refusing to defend the President's illegal and shameful Executive 
order--you have to believe that in the Attorney General's office, your 
job is to defend the President at all costs. That is wrong. I think 
Senator Sessions knows that.
  There is a reason the Justice Department is not led by a Secretary of 
Justice: the Attorney General is the people's attorney, not the 
President's attorney. The Trump administration has already shown us why 
this distinction matters. Within its first two weeks, the current 
administration found itself rebuked in numerous Federal courts around 
the country. Its extreme agenda cast a shadow over all the President's 
nominees. This is an administration that was even criticized yesterday 
by a very conservative Republican, John Yoo, in a New York Times op-ed 
entitled, ``Executive Power Run Amok.'' You know there is a problem 
when the same man who twisted the law in order to green-light torture 
thinks you have gone too far.
  The President seems to have a penchant for going too far. During the 
campaign he promised--and he said this a number of times; it was 
covered in the press--he would implement a Muslim ban. He actually 
stood before the cameras and said that. As President, he then signed an 
Executive order that barred immigration from certain Muslim-majority 
countries but created an exception that gave preference to members of 
minority religions in those countries; that is, non-Muslims. He even 
spoke to a Christian press organization stating he would protect 
Christians. That is nothing more than a Muslim ban by another name.
  My parents and grandparents fought religious biases in this country. 
I have always felt one greatness of this country is when we said there 
would be no religious bias and we would actually stand up for the First 
Amendment. The First Amendment says you can practice any religion you 
want or none if you want, and it gives you freedom of speech. Now if 
you have a country and a government that protects your right to 
practice any religion you want and protects your right of free speech, 
then that same government is protecting diversity, and if you have 
diversity, it is very easy to have democracy.

[[Page 2024]]

  When a Federal judge in Washington State temporarily blocked this 
order, President Trump did not express respectful disagreement as every 
President I have ever known, Republican or Democrat, would. He took to 
Twitter--Twitter, like a teenage kid--to attack the judge's legitimacy, 
labeling him a ``so-called judge.'' President Trump attempted to blame 
this judge who was nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by 
a Republican-led Senate for any future terrorist attack on this 
country. The President's words are beyond outrageous. It is almost as 
though he wants to precipitate a constitutional crisis.
  That is why the question of who should be our next Attorney General 
is so critical. This is a President who must have an Attorney General 
who is willing to stand up and say no for going beyond the law. Sally 
Yates knew that. Two years ago, Senator Sessions asked Ms. Yates: ``Do 
you think the Attorney General has a responsibility to say no to the 
President if he asks for something that's improper? A lot of people 
have defended the Lynch nomination, for example, by saying, well, he 
appoints somebody who's going to execute his views. What's wrong with 
that? But if the views the President wants to execute are unlawful, 
should the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General say no?''
  Ms. Yates answered that her duty was to the Constitution. Just two 
years later she proved that by telling the President that his travel 
ban was indefensible under the law. Perhaps she was remembering the 
commitment she made to Senator Sessions, and that is exactly what she 
did.
  Many around Senator Sessions felt that she never should have stood up 
to President Trump. She should stand up to President Obama but not 
President Trump.
  I have reviewed Senator Sessions' long record. I have reviewed his 
responses to many questions from members of the Senate Judiciary 
Committee. I am not convinced that he is capable of telling the 
President no.
  Under oath, Senator Sessions denied that he was involved in creating 
the Muslim ban Executive order. Well, I will take him at his word, but 
Senator Sessions' views on this issue are well known to Members of the 
Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2015 I offered a simple resolution in 
the committee. It expressed the sense of the Senate that the United 
States must not bar individuals from entering into the United States 
based on their religion--a very simple resolution. Every Democrat, most 
of the Republicans--including the Republican chairman, Senator 
Grassley--voted in support of my resolution. The committee recognized 
that imposing a religious test for those who seek to enter this country 
violates our most cherished values, but Senator Sessions broke away 
from the majority of his Republican colleagues, and he strongly opposed 
the resolution. I found that deeply concerning in 2015 when he was a 
Member of the committee. I find it even more disturbing now that he 
seeks to be our Nation's top law enforcement official. We need an 
Attorney General who will stand in the way of religious discrimination, 
not one who endorses it.
  Today I am introducing a very similar resolution. It reaffirms that 
no one should be blocked from entering into the United States because 
of their nationality or their religion. I invite Senator Sessions--and 
I invite all Senators--to cosponsor this resolution. Senator Sessions 
is still taking an active role in the Senate, including voting on 
controversial Cabinet nominees for President Trump. If he cosponsored 
it, it would help to reassure Americans that he stands against 
religious discrimination and religious tests.
  But my concerns about whether Senator Sessions would be willing to 
tell President Trump no extend well beyond religious tests. In fact, in 
his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, both Republicans and 
Democrats, he did not demonstrate to the Judiciary Committee that he 
would be willing to tell the President no on any issue, no matter how 
objectionable.
  Take, for example, the President's many conflicts of interest. For 
months, there has been media coverage about President Trump's conflicts 
of interest and the constitutional concerns they present. Yet Senator 
Sessions repeatedly evaded my written questions on this topic by 
claiming that he has ``not studied the issue.''
  I asked Senator Sessions whether President Trump should follow 
guidance from the Office of Government Ethics and divest from assets 
that might create a conflict of interest. Senator Sessions said that he 
has not studied the issue.
  I asked Senator Sessions whether President Trump receiving payments 
from entities controlled by foreign governments raises any concerns 
under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids such 
payments absent Congressional consent. Senator Sessions said that he 
has not studied the issue.
  I asked Senator Sessions whether President Trump's family members who 
are running the organization that he still owns should participate in 
policy discussions or meetings with foreign governments. Again Senator 
Sessions said that he has not studied the issue.
  Senator Sessions has refused to acknowledge that there is a conflict 
of interest for a President to have a personal financial stake in the 
policies pursued by his administration. Actually, that is definition 
101 of a conflict of interest. The President should not personally 
profit from their decisions. This answer was particularly troubling 
because I know that he knows the right answer. Senator Sessions told 
Senator Feinstein at his hearing: ``I own no individual stocks because 
I want to be sure that I don't have conflicts of interest.'' He added, 
``I want to adhere to high standards.'' Well, I appreciate that. But 
Senator Sessions--and I assume Attorney General Sessions--apparently 
refuses to hold the President to any standards at all.
  In fact, his woeful blindness extends even to the Russian 
interference into our democracy. In response to questions in the 
Intelligence Committee's report on Russian interference--the 
intelligence community found without a doubt that we had Russian 
influence in our democracy--he said: ``I have not reviewed the report, 
but I have no reason not to accept the intelligence community's 
conclusions as contained in the report.''
  Well, if he hasn't read the report on something as critical as this, 
I suspect he is one of very few Senators who hasn't. I asked him 
whether the activities described in the report are illegal: Are they a 
threat to our democratic process? For anyone other than President 
Trump, that is not a difficult question. Reading the report, the answer 
should be an obvious yes, but Senator Sessions refused to answer. If 
Senator Sessions is not willing even to acknowledge facts that make 
President Trump uncomfortable, how can we believe that Attorney General 
Sessions will ever say no to President Trump?
  Senator Sessions also refused to answer questions from all nine 
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee on how he would respond if 
President Trump pressured him to end any investigations into Russian 
interference in our elections.
  There is absolutely nothing in Senator Sessions' testimony before the 
Judiciary Committee that gives me confidence that he would be willing 
to stand up to the President. He has demonstrated only blind 
allegiance. This is a President who first cited what is now called 
``alternative facts'' to deny his small crowd size at the inauguration, 
but now he is citing ``alternative facts'' to excuse murders and 
assassinations by Putin's regime. That should alarm us all. It 
shouldn't matter what party you belong to; as Americans, that should 
alarm us.
  Later tonight I will describe my concerns about Senator Sessions' 
record on civil rights issues. But I have one concern that is made much 
worse, given Senator Sessions' lack of independence from President 
Trump. I am particularly worried that, if confirmed, Senator Sessions 
will fail to protect Americans' constitutional right to vote. There is 
nothing more sacred in a democracy than the right to vote. Yet Senator 
Sessions called it ``a good day

[[Page 2025]]

for the South''--not for the country but for the South--when the Shelby 
County decision, which effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, was 
handed down, something that virtually every Republican and Democrat in 
both the House and Senate voted for that President Bush signed into 
law.
  The fact that Senator Sessions voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights 
Act in 2006 doesn't give me much comfort when immediately after that 
unanimous vote, he turned around and argued, notwithstanding his vote, 
that it was unconstitutional.
  We cannot view his record on this issue in isolation because if he is 
nominated and confirmed to be President Trump's Attorney General--well, 
we know the President has his own views on voting in America. Several 
Republicans, like the Speaker of the House, Mr. Ryan, and our own 
colleague Senator Graham, have rightly condemned President Trump's wild 
conspiracy theory that the millions of illegal votes cost him the 
popular vote, which he lost by nearly 3 million votes. I fear that 
continuing this dangerous falsehood can be used to justify further 
attacks on the hard-won right to vote for racial minorities, students, 
poor and elderly citizens.
  What bothers me the most is that Senator Sessions again refused to 
acknowledge the fundamental and plainly visible fact that the President 
is flat out wrong that there were 3 million illegal votes cast. Senator 
Sessions responded to me that he doesn't know what data the President 
may have relied on. Well, the rest of us know there isn't any such 
data, but Senator Sessions refuses to admit as much.
  So his close ties to President Trump and the important role he played 
in forming President Trump's agenda raise important questions about his 
impartiality in matters involving the President. I asked him several 
times, What is the scenario in which he would recuse himself, given 
clear conflicts of interest? But he brushed those questions off. He 
claimed he was ``merely . . . a supporter of the President's during the 
campaign.'' Well, that would be fine, but I think Senator Sessions is 
selling himself short.
  He was widely reported to be a central figure in the Trump campaign. 
A key figure in the Trump campaign, Steve Bannon, called him the 
President's ``clearinghouse for policy and philosophy.''
  This relationship appears to fly in the face of the Justice 
Department's recusal standards. The Department's standards mandate 
recusal when the attorney has ``a close identification with an elected 
official . . . arising from service as a principal adviser thereto or a 
principal official thereof.'' I asked Senator Sessions the obvious 
question--whether that language would apply to his relationship with 
President Trump, but he refused to say one way or the other.
  The Justice Department has to be independent because it is the chief 
law enforcement department in our government. But I worry about that 
independence in this administration. It is already clear that if you 
say no to this President, there goes your job. Now more than ever, we 
need an Attorney General who is willing to pay that cost for the good 
of the country--for the good of the country. Country outweighs any 
partisan interest of a particular officeholder or a particular 
President.
  I am not convinced that that kind of independence describes Senator 
Sessions. He has not demonstrated the independence that he himself used 
to demand of nominees.
  David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, 
recently wrote an article in the Atlantic addressing whether someone 
should accept an invitation to serve in the Trump administration, given 
the real risks that there may be tremendous ``pressure to do the wrong 
thing.'' The ``very first thing to consider,'' said the former Bush 
speechwriter, is, ``How sure are you that you indeed would say no? And 
then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump 
administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right 
thing--would they have asked you in the first place?''
  In the case of the nominee before us--the Trump administration's 
``clearinghouse for policy and philosophy,'' as Mr. Bannon called him--
I fear the answer to these questions is clear. That is why I am going 
to be voting against this nominee.
  It is ironic that as we consider the nomination of Senator Sessions 
to be the Attorney General, a position which he is going to be 
responsible for is defending the fundamental rights and liberties of 
the American people--all of us--whether you were supporters during the 
last campaign of President Trump or Secretary Hillary Clinton. But even 
though Senator Sessions is supposed to defend our fundamental rights, 
we see President Trump continuing to praise Russian President Vladimir 
Putin, who has repeatedly demonstrated his disdain for freedom of 
speech, of association, of due process, and of the rule of law.
  In less than a week the President has attacked a Federal judge for 
performing his constitutional duty. He has called unfavorable polls 
``fake.'' He has continued to discredit as ``dishonest'' any media 
outlet that dares criticize him. His spokesperson, Sean Spicer, echoes 
these sentiments. They sound remarkably like what one would expect to 
hear from Vladimir Putin.
  In fact, President Trump has done this while reiterating his support 
of torture and his admiration of Putin. Remember, Putin's critics 
continue to turn up dead. Putin has stolen tens of billions of dollars 
that were taken in bribes from oil and gas and other industries. 
President Trump seems unaware of this, or is unconcerned about it, even 
though everybody knows about it.
  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, after repeatedly lauding 
Putin's leadership, Trump is now attempting to emulate Putin's efforts 
to spread misinformation, chastise his critics, and intimidate those 
responsible for upholding the law. His assaults on anyone he perceives 
to be standing in his way, including a Federal judge nominated by 
President George W. Bush, is even worse than his routine expressions of 
contempt for political norms that seem to be coming straight out of 
Stephen Bannon's playbook. Not only has the President expressed little, 
if any, concern that every U.S. intelligence agency--every U.S. 
intelligence agency--believes that Russia sought to influence, and 
quite possibly did influence, the Presidential election, and that Putin 
himself was involved, but Senator Sessions, who campaigned for the 
President, refused to recuse himself from decisions related to Russia's 
cyber attacks.
  Can anybody imagine what the Republican leadership would be saying if 
the table was turned? They would try to shut down the government to 
hold a new election.
  Failing that, they would demand that an independent commission be 
established to investigate the Russian hacking, and they would insist 
that the nominee for Attorney General pledge to recuse himself.
  Well, along with Senator Durbin and others, I have called for such an 
independent commission outside of Congress, but the Republican leaders 
have summarily rejected it. It is cynical politics at its worst that 
puts partisanship over the integrity of our elections.
  President Trump and Senator Sessions both speak about the importance 
of law and order. President Trump and Vladimir Putin seem to agree 
about what those words mean. Senator Sessions has said nothing to 
suggest that he disagrees, even though the Congressional Republican 
leadership recognizes Putin as a dangerous thug who tramples on the 
rule of law.
  Why does our President keep praising this man who assassinates his 
critics, who has killed people who have criticized him in the media, 
who has stolen so much money, and taken so many bribes? He has become 
one of the wealthiest people in the world, but he is not a person to 
praise. We have a lot of leaders in our own country--both Republicans 
and Democrats--whom we can praise, but not Vladimir Putin.
  I think we have to be careful. We have to care about the integrity of 
our democracy, about due process, the rule

[[Page 2026]]

of law, and about the constitutional checks and balances that 
distinguish this country from autocracies like Russia. We should expect 
the nominee for Attorney General to demonstrate that he will defend 
these principles, not to remain silent when they are attacked, even if 
the person attacking them is the President of the United States.
  Mr. President, I see the distinguished senior Senator from 
Connecticut on the floor.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Johnson). The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to follow my 
distinguished colleague from Vermont who has led the Judiciary 
Committee with such vision and courage over so many years, and whom I 
respect as a former prosecutor, as I am, as well as a litigator and a 
conscience of the Senate.
  I am deeply concerned that our Nation is careening toward a 
constitutional crisis, a legal nightmare that will test the 
independence of the judiciary and require the utmost resolve and 
integrity from everyone involved in the justice system and from the 
Congress, because only the Congress may provide the kind of check on 
the ongoing assault against our court system.
  President Trump repeatedly has tried to put himself above the law, 
and in just a few weeks has moved from scorning conflict-of-interest 
and disclosure principles to promulgating destructive, discriminatory 
Executive orders, and openly attacking the judiciary. His personal 
invectives and insults are unprecedented for the President of the 
United States against the judiciary. Without respect for the rule of 
law and the court system, democracy fails. No Cabinet member has more 
responsibility to ensure that the justice system is given this 
necessary respect and trust than the Attorney General of the United 
States. The sweeping authority in this position impacts the lives and 
livelihoods of everyday Americans, implicating everything from our 
immigration system to law enforcement, to civil rights, national 
security, capital punishment, sentencing, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
  This job is one I know well. Like some of my colleagues, I served as 
U.S. attorney in the Department of Justice as the chief Federal 
prosecutor for Connecticut, for several years, reporting to the U.S. 
Attorney General, and, then, for several years afterward, as a private 
litigator, and, then, for 20 years as attorney general of the State of 
Connecticut. I fought alongside, and sometimes against, the U.S. 
Attorney General and the armies of lawyers at his disposal. In fact, 
the Attorney General commands thousands of lawyers who embody his power 
to speak on behalf of the United States. His job is to protect the 
public from criminal offenders and to convict the guilty, but also to 
protect the innocent who may be wrongly accused and to assure that 
justice is done.
  In fact, as Justice Jackson said about the role of the U.S. Attorney 
General, which he filled, he is to seek justice, not just win cases. I 
know how powerful this position can be and how crucial the Attorney 
General is not as the appointee of a politician but as a servant of 
justice.
  In discharging this sacred obligation, the Attorney General must 
always remain independent, not just in reality but in appearance. His 
decisions must supersede partisan politics. In most cases, there is, in 
fact, no recourse from his decision without political interference, 
which would be improper. He is not just another government lawyer. He 
is not just another Cabinet position. He is the Nation's lawyer. He is 
the people's lawyer. He must be the Nation's legal conscience.
  This job requires a singular level of intellect and integrity, and a 
nonpartisan, but passionate devotion to the rule of law.
  Over the past week, as our Nation's courts did their job and sorted 
through the implications of the President's hasty, ill-conceived, and 
illegal Executive orders, President Trump called into question the very 
integrity of our judicial system. Not only did he label U.S. District 
Court Judge Robart a ``so-called judge,'' but he also suggested that 
the American people should blame him and our ``court system'' if 
something should happen as a result of the court's blocking his 
Executive order.
  In this anticipatory blame, the bluster and bullying are 
inappropriate and un-Presidential, and I believe they threaten harm to 
our democracy as well as the judicial system.
  The comments were deeply disturbing to all of us who believe in the 
integrity of the judicial system--including the American Bar 
Association, which said through Linda Klein, its president, that 
``personal attacks on judges are attacks on our Constitution,'' and 
``the independence of the judiciary is not up for negotiation . . . 
independence from party politics, independence from Congress, and 
independence from the president of the United States himself.''
  Ms. Klein called upon all lawyers to defend the rule of law in light 
of these attacks on the Constitution. I echo this call proudly today, 
the importance of which cannot be overstated. Nowhere is that job more 
significant than the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of 
the United States as head of that Department. The agency is tasked with 
seeking and achieving justice, not with carrying out the President's 
agenda as a priority.
  That does not mean lawyers at the Department of Justice who are 
currently defending the orders in court are acting improperly or 
wrongly. What it means is, the country needs an independent justice 
system staffed by people who are ready to stand up and speak out to a 
President whose orders may contravene constitutional law.
  We saw this principle in action last week. We saw what it really 
means to serve at the Department of Justice and represent not the 
President but the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of 
law. Former Acting Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Sally 
Yates took a stand based on moral and legal principle, and I thank Ms. 
Yates for her courage and strength in that action. Holding herself to 
the highest traditions of the Department of Justice, Ms. Yates said 
that in her judgment these orders cannot be defended, that the rule of 
law and morality is more important than the politics of the moment and 
the impulsive edicts of a ruler who apparently fails to uphold the law. 
Her actions raised the question of whether the next Attorney General 
will have the same courage and strength.
  Ms. Yates demonstrated genuine grit and grace in standing strong for 
the rule of law. Her actions are in the long, proud tradition of the 
Department. Not since Watergate has an Attorney General or Acting 
Attorney General been fired for acting in accordance with their 
conscience and the rule of law. Unfortunately, President Trump 
threatens to return us to that era. He has made his intentions clear: 
The Department of Justice will not be an independent authority acting 
on behalf of the American people. Instead, it will be just another 
enabler of the President's ongoing efforts to substitute his whims and 
wishes for legal and ethical responsibilities.
  I believe the President's orders are misguided and illegal. The 
courts will rule in days. His orders are wrong, in no small part, 
because they threaten to take away one of the primary reasons why ours 
is the greatest country in the history of the world--the country that 
my father, a refugee from Nazi Germany, sought in 1935. He arrived here 
at 17 years old with not much more than the shirt on his back, speaking 
little English, knowing just about no one. This country gave him the 
chance to succeed.
  I think about how sad and ashamed he would be if he saw the actions 
taken by this President: orders to ban people from coming into this 
country because of their religion; prioritizing one religion against 
another and raising fears that do damage to our core constitutional 
principles.
  Barring refugees like children who are harmed in other lands seeking 
to come to this country deprives us of the great talents, gifts, and 
energy that have helped to shape and build this country because we are 
truly stronger as a result of our diversity. We are a

[[Page 2027]]

nation of immigrants. Our strength comes from the talents, energy, and 
vibrancy of these individuals who come to this country as children with 
their parents.
  This order makes us less safe because it provides a recruiting tool 
to extremists like ISIS. We are at war with ISIS, and we must win that 
war. It frays trust between law enforcement and Muslim communities, but 
it also weakens us in a deeper moral sense. It is wrong. It is morally 
wrong. It is wrong for this great country, devoted and founded on the 
ideals welcoming people seeking that beacon of hope, opportunity, and 
protection.
  The rule of law protects us from these moral harms, but the rule of 
law depends on people. Fortunately, even as we have seen the harms of 
these past few days play out in real time, we have also seen people who 
are willing to stand strong against them. People have gone to the 
streets in marches and rallies in the New Haven Green and in front of 
our State capitol in Connecticut, and all across our State, saying it 
is not only wrong, but they will rally against this wrong.
  All of these points are simply to say that the position of Attorney 
General is so important because he must stand strong as well for the 
rule of law. He must be able to speak truth to power. He must have the 
courage and strength to say to the President of the United States: This 
order is unconstitutional, not just unwise and unwarranted but illegal.
  I have, unfortunately, reached the conclusion that Senator Sessions 
cannot be counted on to play that role, to defend the rule of law, to 
be a champion of civil rights and civil liberties, not to just follow 
the law but to lead in this challenge that faces our country as never 
before because our rights and liberties are now threatened as never 
before. He must be a vigorous advocate, not a passive follower of the 
law.
  Senator Sessions showed this point to me through his testimony at his 
hearing and his subsequent responses. While he must be ready to say no 
to the President, what we saw demonstrated so vividly is that Senator 
Sessions' record and testimony indicates he is unwilling or unready to 
perform his core tasks.
  President Trump's vast business holdings present an unprecedented 
threat of conflict of interest. Yet the President has not only refused 
to divest himself, he has mocked the idea that he should. Should 
conflicts arise, the Attorney General must be willing to maintain 
impartiality, including appointing a special counsel or prosecutor if 
necessary. There are so many scenarios requiring this step. Yet when I 
asked Senator Sessions about enforcement of cases against illegal 
conflicts of interest involving the President and his family--such as 
violations of the emoluments clause or the STOCK Act--he equivocated. 
When I asked him about appointing a special counsel to investigate 
criminal wrongdoing at Deutsche Bank, owed more than $300 million by 
President Donald Trump, he equivocated. When I asked him about the 
investigation of Russian hacking, he equivocated. His answers to 
questions I submitted to him in writing were no better. Those answers 
give me no confidence that he will be an independent, nonpolitical 
enforcer against conflicts of interest and official self-enrichment 
that the Nation needs. At a moment when the incoming administration 
faces ethical and legal controversies that are unprecedented in scope 
and scale, Senator Sessions has simply given us no confidence that he 
will appoint an independent counsel or demonstrate the independence 
that is necessary.
  His record over many years and his recent testimony fail to 
demonstrate the core commitments and convictions necessary to be our 
next Attorney General. He has failed to show how he can be that legal 
conscience, that unmistakable, unshakable, ethical voice independent 
from the White House. He has failed to prove that he will be a champion 
of constitutional rights. Indeed, his career demonstrates an antipathy 
and hostility to the very rights and liberties that the Nation's chief 
law enforcement officer must always promote proactively, as well as 
defend.
  Focus for a moment, shall we, on some of the rights that affect women 
and their privacy. Women comprise more than half the population, but 
unfortunately our society and our laws have too frequently prevented 
them from achieving the equality that every American should enjoy. Over 
the course of his career, Senator Sessions has opposed key legislation 
that protects and further enhances women's rights. As a Senator, that 
trend was worrying. As Attorney General of the United States, it must 
be disqualifying.
  In 1973, the Supreme Court recognized a vital constitutional right of 
privacy for women. It is a right that is both basic and fundamental, 
now enshrined in five decades of precedent, that women have the freedom 
to choose what medical procedures they will undergo to make private 
health care decisions and personal reproductive rights decisions 
without interference from the government.
  As we all know, declaring abortion illegal solves no problem. Laws 
against abortion do not stop them from happening, it simply stops them 
from happening in a safe, legal manner. Laws that restrict abortion 
force women to put their own lives at peril rather than enjoying full 
freedom. Yet Senator Sessions' congressional record and hearing show 
that he is inherently opposed to providing women with the ability to 
make those preeminently private health care decisions.
  He has gone on record stating he believes Roe v. Wade was 
constitutionally unsound and wrongly decided. He voted against an 
amendment that expressed constitutional support for the underlying 
Supreme Court decision. Most troubling, he supported a constitutional 
amendment to ban abortion with only a few inadequate exceptions. It is 
no surprise that he has been supported by extremist groups like 
Operation Rescue. As Attorney General of the United States, Senator 
Sessions would be tasked with protecting the very women whose rights he 
has criticized.
  Far too many women seeking to exercise their constitutional rights 
are already faced with violence and harassment outside of health 
clinics. I know only too well the kind of intimidation and fear-
inspired actions that can take place because as attorney general of my 
State, I enforce the statute to protect those clinics.
  Those women look to the Department of Justice to enforce the Federal 
law that prohibits interference with people seeking to access these 
clinics, and it keeps them safe. There is a very real concern about 
whether these women will receive the same protection under Senator 
Sessions' tenure. With limited resources across the Department of 
Justice, decisions must be made by the Attorney General in setting 
priorities for enforcement.
  Senator Sessions' past positions and stances make clear that the 
protection of women's rights is far from a priority for him. He told me 
at the hearing that he would ``enforce the law.'' But when important 
constitutional rights are under threat, American women need more than 
someone who will simply follow or enforce the law. They need a champion 
and so do all of our civil rights and civil liberties and voting rights 
and other key freedoms.
  I am disturbed as well by Senator Sessions' vote against 
reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. He has stated that he 
does not oppose the principle or some of the provisions of the law, and 
I take him at his word, but the circumstances behind his vote are no 
less disturbing. We must recognize that our Nation's tribal communities 
face epidemics of both domestic and sexual violence. Studies show that 
almost three out of five Native American women have been assaulted and 
that one-third of all Native American women are raped during their 
lifetime.
  The VAWA Reauthorization of 2013, the Violence Against Women Act, 
that he voted against included significant new language that closed a 
glaring loophole in the jurisdictional requirements of this basic law. 
The bill guaranteed and granted tribal communities power over non-
Indian defendants who commit domestic violence against Native Americans 
in Indian Country. Before the reauthorization act, tribal

[[Page 2028]]

courts lacked jurisdiction to prosecute these horrific crimes and often 
the assaulter would escape prosecution entirely.
  During his confirmation hearing, Senator Sessions told us that he had 
``a big concern'' about that jurisdictional provision in the 
reauthorization act. He was concerned that the law would leave non-
Native Americans open to prosecution under tribal law, despite 
safeguards in the bill that were clear and unequivocal. The large gaps 
that the original law left were apparently acceptable to him.
  Additionally, the VAWA reauthorization included a nondiscrimination 
clause. This provision protects members of the LGBT community from 
discrimination in housing and employment, schools, and other areas of 
civil rights cases.
  Senator Sessions also took this issue with the nondiscrimination 
provisions in the reauthorization act, including the protection for 
LGBT individuals. He took issue with those provisions.
  I am concerned, also, by several other votes that Senator Sessions 
took in 2004. He voted against extending Federal unemployment benefits 
to people who leave their jobs as a result of being victims of domestic 
or sexual assault.
  In 2009, he voted against an amendment which would have strengthened 
the rights of victims of wage discrimination, contributing to the 
roadblocks and hurdles that women encounter while facing issues of 
inequality.
  As recently as March of 2015, Senator Sessions voted against the 
Paycheck Fairness Act, a vote he has taken multiple times before. These 
bills sought to strengthen women's rights and opportunities in the 
workplace.
  In 2017, our world is one where women still struggle to obtain the 
same pay levels as men in the workplace for the same work. This kind of 
discrimination is un-American and really an embarrassment to our 
Nation.
  Senator Sessions' voting record consistently shows his opposition to 
this kind of key legislation designed to protect women from oppression 
and discrimination and protect women's autonomy and choice, and I 
cannot support an Attorney General with this record.
  Speaking on the floor some time ago, I added other details as to the 
reasons why I have opposed Senator Sessions. I see colleagues on the 
floor right now so I will end here with this point. Over the past 
weeks, I have received an outpouring of outrage from throughout my 
State of Connecticut, more than 4,500 letters from Connecticut 
residents opposing this nomination because they recognize the need, the 
desperate imperative for a true champion of civil rights and liberties, 
constitutional freedoms in this office facing the threat that is more 
real and urgent than ever before in our history.
  Just hours ago, I received a million signatures on a petition from 
civil rights groups. They are contained magically on a thumb drive that 
is so easy to display, even if the signatures are not readily visible, 
but these million brave and steadfast individuals and the organizations 
that represent them. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and 
Liberties, other groups that have proudly and actively worked on this 
cause are to be thanked, as are the advocates throughout the country 
who have galvanized public opinion, raised awareness, and shown what 
democracy looks like.
  This is what democracy looks like. This is what America looks like. 
This is what Connecticut looks like--people rallying and rising up 
against an unconstitutional immigration ban, against a set of nominees 
that fail to reflect and serve America against an Attorney General 
nominee, in particular, who cannot be relied upon to actively and 
aggressively, vigorously, and vigilantly protect our constitutional 
rights and liberties. We need a champion of those rights and liberties.
  I regretfully oppose Jeff Sessions as our next Attorney General 
because we cannot count on him to do so, and I urge my colleagues to 
join in this opposition.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my 
5 minutes, the distinguished senior Senator from New Hampshire, Mrs. 
Shaheen, be recognized for 5 minutes; and following Mrs. Shaheen, the 
distinguished whip of the Republican Party, Mr. Cornyn, be recognized.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                        Biennial Budget Process

  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I come to the floor with a labor of love 
before the U.S. Senate. We are talking about confirmations of people 
for Secretary positions on the Cabinet of the new President. We are 
talking about all kinds of things. We are in a budget period of time. 
We are talking about this year having two budgets--one we are going to 
use early and one we are going to use late.
  The truth is, since 1980, we haven't passed all 12 appropriations 
bills in the year but twice. In other words, in the last 37 years, we 
have only twice done our job that we ought to do every year. So 2 years 
out of 37 we did it; 35 years we did not do it.
  I am joining with the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, a 
great Governor of that State and now a great Member of the U.S. Senate, 
to propound for the third Congress in a row an idea that is so simple 
and so great that it works and it works for all the American people. It 
is called a biennial budget process. What it does is it embraces a 
discipline for how you budget to bring about the right solutions in 
terms of what you do budget.
  What the biennial budget process does is it says this. We would be 
far better off if we had more oversight of spending, more authorization 
projects, and more discipline in the way we spend money we are already 
spending before we start appropriating more.
  Therefore, in every even-numbered year, we ought to do oversight of 
our spending, we ought to do accountability in our spending processes, 
we ought to do accountability in our spending process, and we ought to 
do no appropriations.
  In our odd-numbered years, the nonelection years, is when you 
appropriate. Every other year you are spending, and then every other 
year you are doing accountability. What that causes is the cream to 
rise to the top. All of a sudden in 1 year, instead of departments 
coming to say we don't have time to oversight, we have to authorize 
more, they come to you and say: Here is how we spent our money, here 
are the savings we have found, and here is how we want to move forward 
in a more efficient way.
  It is a little bit like my kitchen table and my family. All the way 
through my 49 years of marriage, my wife and I and our kids have sat 
around the kitchen table, decided what our family priorities are, from 
our vacations to our jobs, and then we budget our money for that year 
so we can pay our bills, enjoy the time we had together, and end up not 
being broke at the of the year.
  What happens when you don't do that and you are a government is you 
end up owing $19 trillion and don't know how to pay for it. We cannot 
continue to spend at the escalated rate that we are spending without 
more accountability on the process so I think the biennial process is 
the right way to go.
  There is some documentation for that. The distinguished Senator from 
New Hampshire was a Governor of her State who had a biennial budget, 
but 19 of the 50 States have biennial budgets already. They work, and 
they work fine. They give them the luxury of doing what we don't do in 
Washington, they give them the luxury of having the time to study their 
appropriations, find savings in existing taxation before they start 
raising anybody's taxes or appropriating anymore.
  It is a simple, disciplined way to go about the business of spending 
the people's money in the same way they make their determination.
  I ran a pretty large company for 19 years and was in business for 35 
years before I came to Congress. I know that running a business is 
hard, but it is not hard because it is complex; it is hard because it 
is tough. Prioritizing your appropriations is tough business.

[[Page 2029]]

Somebody has to do it, and the people who are elected to the Congress 
of the United States are elected to do that job.
  I am proud to join Senator Shaheen on the floor today and urge all 
Members to vote for a biennial budget process in the Congress of the 
United States. I remind everyone in the room that we had this vote a 
few years ago as a test vote on an all-night vote-arama on the budget, 
and we got 72 votes, if I remember correctly, in favor of the biennial 
budget. We have had past Budget Committee chairmen vote in favor of the 
biennial budget.
  We have had people from the majority and the minority vote for it. 
The fact is, it is a good idea whose time has come. I am pleased to 
join Senator Shaheen from New Hampshire and plead to the Members of the 
U.S. Senate to do what we ask the American people to do. Let's 
prioritize the way we spend our money, find savings where we can, and 
run a more efficient, more honest government, and a more transparent 
government for all.
  Mr. President, I yield to the distinguished Senator from New 
Hampshire.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am really pleased to be able to join 
my colleague Senator Isakson from Georgia as we have introduced our 
bipartisan legislation, the Biennial Budgeting and Appropriations Act. 
I think this is a welcomed piece of bipartisan legislation at this 
point in the year.
  I want to start by thanking the Senator from Georgia for his very 
good work on this legislation. He has been leading this effort since he 
first came to the Senate in 2005, and I have been fortunate enough to 
partner with him on the legislation in the past two Congresses.
  I think that by working together, we could pass this commonsense, 
bipartisan legislation that could change the way we do business in 
Washington for the better. As Senator Isakson said, there is no 
question that our budget process is broken.
  Since 1980, we have only finished two budgets on time. In that 
timeframe, Congress has resorted to nearly 170 short-term funding bills 
or continuing resolutions. We also experienced a costly and dangerous 
government shutdown in October of 2013 that cost our economy $24 
billion.
  It hurt small businesses. It hurt the people across this country.
  That is no way to govern. I understand, as Senator Isakson said, that 
biennial budgeting will not fix everything, but it is a reform that 
will encourage us to work across the aisle to become better stewards of 
taxpayer dollars. I can attest to this personally because, as Governor 
of New Hampshire, I saw how you make a biennial budget work.
  In each biennium, I worked with a Republican legislature, and we put 
together a balanced budget in the first year of the legislative 
session. In the second year, we had the opportunity to do oversight. 
That is exactly what this bill would allow us to do here in Washington. 
It is a reform that has worked in New Hampshire, and it has worked in 
18 other States. So as Senator Isakson said, 19 States in all have 
biennial budgeting, and it really gives us a better opportunity to 
review the budget to see what is working, what is effective, and what 
is not.
  One example that I think shows how we can do this better is looking 
at several reports that have been issued by the Government 
Accountability Office. They have found areas of waste, fraud, and 
duplicative programs. And they have identified ways to reform things, 
like our farm program, to cut down inefficiencies in defense, and to 
reduce fraud in health programs. But today, Congress hasn't really 
taken the time and effort to go through those recommendations. Under 
biennial budgeting, we would be able to look at those kinds of 
recommendations and implement savings in the second year of the budget 
process.
  Biennial budgeting also reduces the number of opportunities for 
manufactured crises, like a government shutdown. As Senator Isakson 
said, we have gotten real momentum in the last couple of years. We had 
a great vote in 2013 in the Senate, where we had an overwhelming 
bipartisan group endorse the concept. We saw a vote in the House Budget 
Committee, where legislation on a biennial budget passed with a 
bipartisan vote. It not only passed the House but had over half of the 
House Members as cosponsors. And we saw a favorable hearing in the 
Senate Budget Committee on the legislation, so I think momentum is 
growing for this idea. It is a real way for us to take action to reform 
the budget process and make it work better.
  The bill that we are introducing has 13 bipartisan cosponsors. We are 
going to keep working to get more bipartisan cosponsors, and I hope 
that all of our colleagues will join us in this effort.
  I look forward to continuing to work with Senator Isakson and with 
Senators Enzi and Sanders on the Budget Committee to get this important 
reform through the Senate.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Rubio). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KING. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KING. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my post closure 
debate time to Senator Feinstein from California.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  Mr. KING. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I came to the floor this afternoon to 
address the nominee for Attorney General of the United States, Mr. 
Sessions. The U.S. Constitution provides that the Senate will advise 
and consent on all nominees put forward by the President. This 
fundamental check on Executive power continues to give confidence to 
the public that the individuals charged with the immense 
responsibilities and authorities of our Federal Government are of the 
highest ethical and professional character, are highly qualified, and 
are committed to exercising those powers in a manner that is consistent 
with our founding principles.
  Any person seeking to serve in such high positions of public trust 
ought to be able to explain his or her record of personal and 
professional conduct, not only to close colleagues and friends but also 
to the public they seek to serve.
  I have great respect for Senator Jeff Sessions for his commitment to 
public service, but I don't believe that he is the right choice to 
serve as our Nation's chief law enforcement officer. Time and again in 
the course of his career, his actions have demonstrated disinterest or 
even hostility to many of the civil rights that we rely on the Attorney 
General to protect and defend, from voting rights to civil rights, to 
equality for women, minorities, the LGBTQ community, and people with 
disabilities.
  Senator Sessions' record in the Senate provides little evidence that 
his views have evolved since the last time the Senate evaluated his 
fitness to serve in high Federal office, when President Reagan 
nominated him to serve as a Federal judge in 1986. Three decades ago, 
the Senate voted against his confirmation to serve as Federal judge. 
Today, I believe the Senate should not confirm him to serve as U.S. 
Attorney General.
  At this time in our history, with the growing concern about this 
administration's commitment to basic democratic principles, such as 
equality before the law, separation of powers, freedom of the press, 
and protection of minority views, I cannot support a nominee who has 
failed to demonstrate appreciation for these ideals, regardless of our 
personal relationship. We need an Attorney General who will fight for 
justice

[[Page 2030]]

and equal protection for all Americans, regardless of race, gender, 
religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
  One of my principal objections to this nominee is his record of 
making it harder for certain groups of people to vote. In 2013, in 
Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down section 5 of the 
Voting Rights Act, also known as the preclearance provision. And while 
the overwhelming majority of civil rights organizations considered this 
ruling, which invalidated a landmark achievement of the civil rights 
movement--a devastating defeat--Senator Sessions was quoted as saying 
that it was a ``good thing for the South.'' He has been quoted as 
saying that he views the Voting Rights Act as an intrusive piece of 
legislation. We often refer to the shorthand name for this case, 
calling it simply Shelby County. But I believe the full title is 
instructive: Shelby County v. Holder. Holder, of course, was Attorney 
General Eric Holder. And in this case, the Supreme Court ruled against 
the Department of Justice and against the views of this Congress, which 
voted in 2006 to extend section 5 for another 25 years.
  It also demonstrated the awesome responsibility and discretion of the 
Attorney General. Eric Holder was fighting to protect minorities in 
States with a history of racial discrimination from future voter 
suppression efforts. In contrast, as U.S. Attorney General, Jeff 
Sessions prosecuted several members of the Southern Christian 
Leadership Conference, the great civil rights organization formerly led 
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He indicted these people for allegedly 
attempting to fraudulently register people in minority communities to 
vote. All of those counts were dismissed in that case. However, the 
chilling effect of this type of use of government authority on our 
civil society should not be underestimated. This illustrated the 
awesome power of the prosecutor in our judicial system. That power is 
exponentially greater in the Office of the U.S. Attorney General.
  As I said, Senator Sessions is also an outspoken advocate for voter 
ID laws, including at the Federal level. In State after State, 
including my home State of New Hampshire, unnecessarily stringent voter 
ID laws have been passed by Republicans with the clear intent to deny 
access to the ballot box on the part of minorities, the young, and the 
poor. Striking down the laws passed by Republicans in North Carolina, a 
unanimous Federal court ruled that they ``target African Americans with 
almost surgical precision''--that is a direct quote--and ``impose cures 
for problems that did not exist.''
  Invalidating similar laws in Wisconsin, U.S. District Court Judge 
James Peterson wrote: ``The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a 
preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real 
incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance 
confidence in the elections, particularly in minority communities.''
  President Trump has falsely claimed on numerous occasions that 3 to 5 
million undocumented immigrants voted in the election in November. We 
have even heard that claim in New Hampshire, where our deputy secretary 
of State, a Republican, has said those claims are not accurate.
  Throughout our history, these arguments, not grounded in fact and 
data, have been used as a pretext for advancing new voter ID laws, 
including at the national level. Yet, as Attorney General, Senator 
Sessions would enthusiastically support this agenda. I believe that to 
be disqualifying for any nominee to serve as Attorney General.
  When I was Governor of New Hampshire, I had the honor of being able 
to appoint the attorney general in our State. My qualification was that 
the attorney general should be the people's attorney. I think that is 
no less true of the Attorney General of the United States.
  I am also deeply concerned by the nominee's record on issues 
associated with women's health and autonomy. For example, as Senator 
Blumenthal said so eloquently earlier this afternoon: Senator Sessions 
voted against the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women 
Act. This law has been reauthorized on a bipartisan basis each time it 
has been brought up since 1994.
  The 2013 reauthorization expanded the scope of domestic violence 
programs, yet Senator Sessions was one of only 22 who voted no. This is 
of particular concern when we see the framework for what is suggested 
will be the Trump administration's budget, which would eliminate the 
Office on Violence Against Women at a time when one in five women is a 
victim of rape, either completed or attempted.
  Senator Sessions has also been a fierce opponent of a woman's right 
to choose. He voted against a resolution supporting the Roe v. Wade 
decision, which affirmed the constitutional right of women to control 
our own reproductive choices. He has cosponsored legislation to 
prohibit Federal funding for health insurance plans that include 
coverage of abortion. He even opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, 
which removed barriers to women who bring charges of discriminatory 
wage practices.
  Senator Sessions voted against it in 2008 and again in 2009, when it 
became law over his opposition. Senator Sessions has consistently 
argued for ``color blind'' enforcement of our Nation's civil rights 
laws. He contends that racism in the United States has been effectively 
addressed, and, therefore, diversity programs unfairly discriminate 
against White Americans.
  For the same reason, he has voted against legislation to protect the 
rights and safety of the LGBT community. In 2009, he vehemently opposed 
the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, which protects LGBT Americans from 
hate crimes. In debate on that proposed law, Senator Sessions said:

       Today I am not sure women or people with different sexual 
     orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don't 
     see it.

  Well, Senator Sessions, if you talked to the members of the gay and 
lesbian community, as I have, if you would talk to women across this 
country who have faced discrimination in employment practices, who have 
faced discrimination before the Affordable Care Act, in terms of our 
health insurance, who have faced discrimination in terms of getting 
justice in cases of violence against women, you would understand that 
we need to make sure that the laws protect women and minorities.
  In 2013, Senator Sessions voted against a measure to prohibit 
discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation or gender 
identity. He also voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban 
gay marriage.
  Mrs. McCASKILL. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for 1 sentence?
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I will yield to the honorable Senator 
from Missouri.
  Mrs. McCASKILL. Thank you so much. I yield the remainder of my 
postcloture debate time to Senator Feinstein.
  I thank Senator Shaheen. I apologize for interrupting.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. So in 2013, as I was saying, Senator Sessions voted 
against a measure to prohibit discrimination in the workplace based on 
sexual orientation or gender identity. And similarly, he voted in favor 
of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Finally, Senator 
Sessions' views on immigration are just outside the mainstream. Most 
Americans want fair, humane treatment for would-be immigrants to the 
United States, as well as for undocumented immigrants who are already 
here.
  Senator Sessions has amply demonstrated that he does not agree with 
this view. Since he came to the Senate, he has been a leading opponent 
of bipartisan immigration reform efforts. In 2007 and again in 2013, he 
was instrumental in defeating immigration reform proposals that had 
widespread support in Congress and the country.
  More recently, he has been a key adviser to Candidate Trump and now 
President Trump on immigration policies, encouraging extreme positions 
such as a ban on Muslim immigration and harsh treatment of DREAMers,

[[Page 2031]]

those undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as young 
children.
  I have also had the opportunity to work with Senator Sessions in 
trying to renew and extend the special immigrant visa program for those 
Afghans and Iraqis who helped our men and women in the military as we 
were fighting conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have heard from 
multiple members of our military who served that these interpreters and 
these people from Iraq and Afghanistan who worked with them to make 
sure that they could help keep them safe have saved lives and have made 
a difference in that military conflict because of the help they 
provided to our fighting men and women.
  Yet Senator Sessions, as we were trying to extend that program, was 
unwilling to allow us to make sure that we could bring them to the 
United States, with all of the vetting that goes on to make sure that 
the people who come here are actually people who helped us. He opposed 
extending that program to allow all of those folks to come here.
  I believe we need an Attorney General who will not only insist on 
equal enforcement of the laws but who has a passion for pursuing 
justice and fairness for all Americans, as well as for those who want 
to visit or who want to immigrate to the United States. In my view, 
Senator Sessions has failed to demonstrate that commitment.
  Indeed, I worry that as Attorney General, Senator Sessions would 
affirm and encourage Trump's most troubling tendencies, especially with 
regard to minorities, to women, to immigrants, and to the LGBTQ 
community. I believe Senator Sessions is the wrong person for the 
critically important post of U.S. Attorney General. I intend to vote 
against his confirmation.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my postcloture 
debate time to Senator Schumer. I want to thank Senator Thune for his 
courtesy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we continue to just sort of--at a glacial 
pace--work our way through the nominations. We have in front of us the 
nomination for Attorney General of Senator Jeff Sessions, a colleague 
of ours. I am very excited to be able to support his nomination to be 
the next Attorney General of the United States.
  But unfortunately it is taking an extraordinarily long time for us to 
plow through this because Democrats continue to use procedural 
roadblocks to keep the administration from being able to get their team 
in place. I say that, having concluded today, based on the research 
that we have been able to assemble, that this is the slowest pace for 
Cabinet approval since George Washington.
  Now, that sounds a little melodramatic, but I think it is accurate. 
In fact, if you go back to the Eisenhower administration and roll 
forward to today, every President, going back to Eisenhower, has had 
their Cabinet completely or mostly in place by today. In fact, going 
back to the 1880s and up through the 1930s, the entire Cabinet for 
those administrations was approved on day one--day one of the 
Presidency.
  Here we are, as we again continue to run into dilatory tactics by the 
Democrats here in the Senate. There have been now, I think, seven of 
the Cabinet-level nominees of President Trump who have been confirmed. 
At this point in President Obama's first term in office, there were 21 
confirmed. So this idea that somehow some purpose is achieved or some 
goal accomplished by dragging this process on, I think, does a great 
disservice to the American people who, when they voted last fall, voted 
with an expectation that when they put a new President in office, that 
President would be able to assemble his team and get them about the 
important work of governing this country.
  So it is regrettable that we are where we are. It is unprecedented 
and historic, the levels to which the Democrats here in this Chamber 
have taken their attempts to slow this process down. I hope that will 
change. I hope we can get back on track here, get this team put in 
place, and then let's get on with the important work we have to do.
  There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done to make this country 
stronger, more competitive, safer for Americans today, to get the 
economy growing at a faster rate, to create better-paying jobs, and 
increase wages. There is just a lot of stuff that this body needs to be 
working on. Right now, what we are doing is simply human resources 
business. We are trying to confirm people to positions, but it could go 
so much smoother, so much easier, so much more quickly, and so much 
more efficiently if we would just get a little cooperation from the 
Democrats in the Senate. I hope that will happen because this is 
unprecedented, as I said, in the level of degree to which the Democrats 
are stooping.


                       Nomination of Neil Gorsuch

  Last week, President Trump announced his nomination for the Supreme 
Court. He made an outstanding choice. Judge Neil Gorsuch has a 
distinguished resume. He graduated with honors from Harvard Law School 
and went on to receive a doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford 
University, where he was a Marshall scholar.
  He clerked for two Supreme Court Justices, Byron White and Anthony 
Kennedy. He worked in both private practice and at the Justice 
Department before being nominated to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals 
where he served with distinction for 10 years. He is widely regarded as 
a brilliant and thoughtful jurist and a gifted writer whose opinions 
are known for their clarity.
  Above all--above all--he is known for his impartiality, for his 
commitment to following the law wherever it leads, whether he likes the 
results or not. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very 
likely a bad judge, Judge Gorsuch has said more than once. Why? Because 
a judge who likes every outcome he reaches is likely making decisions 
based on something other than the law. That is a problem.
  The job of a judge is to interpret the law, not to write it; to call 
balls and strikes, not to design the rules of the game. Everyone's 
rights are put in jeopardy when judges step outside their appointed 
role and start changing the meaning of the law to suit their personal 
opinions.
  Judge Gorsuch's nomination has been greeted with praise by liberals 
as well as conservatives. I think one of the biggest reasons for that 
is that both groups know that Judge Gorsuch can be relied on to judge 
impartially. Here is what Neal Katyal, an Acting Solicitor General for 
President Obama had to say about Judge Gorsuch:

       I have seen him up close and in action, both in court and 
     on the Federal Appellate Rules Committee (where both of us 
     serve); he brings a sense of fairness and decency to the job 
     and a temperament that suits the Nation's highest Court. I, 
     for one, wish it were a Democrat choosing the next justice, 
     but since that is not to be, one basic criterion should be 
     paramount: Is the nominee someone who will stand up for the 
     rule of law and say no to a President or Congress that strays 
     beyond the Constitution and law?

  I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to 
restore confidence in the rule of law.

       His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial 
     independence, a record that should give the American people 
     confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the 
     President who appointed him.

  Again, those are the words of Neal Katyal, formerly an Acting 
Solicitor General for President Obama.
  When Judge Gorsuch was nominated to the Tenth Circuit Court of 
Appeals, his nomination sailed through the Senate. Both of his home 
State Senators--one a Republican and one a Democrat--supported his 
nomination, and he was confirmed by a unanimous vote.
  Then-Senator Obama could have objected to the nomination. He didn't. 
Senator Schumer could have objected to the nomination. He didn't. Then-
Senators Biden or Clinton or Kennedy could have objected to the 
nomination, but they didn't. Why? Presumably because they saw what 
almost everybody sees today; that Judge Gorsuch is exactly the kind of 
judge we want on the

[[Page 2032]]

bench--supremely qualified, thoughtful, fair, and impartial.
  Unfortunately, this time around, some Senate Democrats are being less 
public-spirited. They are upset that their party didn't win the 
Presidential election so they are threatening to filibuster an 
eminently qualified nominee, an eminently qualified nominee that a 
number of them had previously supported.
  The Democratic leader recently said:

       Now more than ever, we need a Supreme Court Justice who is 
     independent, eschews ideology, who will preserve our 
     democracy, protect fundamental rights, and will stand up to a 
     President who has already shown a willingness to bend the 
     Constitution.

  That, of course, is precisely the kind of judge that Judge Gorsuch 
is, as pretty much everyone who knows him--both liberal and 
conservative--can attest, but leaving that aside, if the Democratic 
leader really has these concerns about Judge Gorsuch, why did he allow 
him to receive a unanimous confirmation to the Tenth Circuit? Surely, 
if he had these concerns, it was his obligation to speak up.
  No one likes to lose an election, but that is what happens in a 
democracy, and throwing a temper tantrum and refusing to play ball 
after you lose is not the most enlightened response. Democrats are not 
really concerned that Judge Gorsuch is a raving rightwing ideologue. 
When liberal after liberal attests to his fairness and impartiality, it 
is pretty hard to pretend that he is anything but an excellent pick for 
the Supreme Court. Democrats just don't want to confirm him because 
they are mad that President Trump is the one who nominated him.
  Well, it is time for them to get over that. It is one thing to oppose 
the President when he does something they believe truly endangers our 
country; it is another thing entirely for them to oppose this 
outstandingly well-qualified nominee because they are still upset about 
the election.
  Republicans lost the Presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, but we 
allowed up-or-down votes when President Obama nominated Justices Elena 
Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Had this election gone the other way, we 
were prepared to consider a Hillary Clinton nominee.
  It is time for Democrats to stop threatening obstruction and to get 
down to the business of considering Judge Gorsuch's nomination.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I just wanted to take a minute. I know 
we have several people waiting to speak, but I wanted to respond to my 
colleague from South Dakota because I think for Senator Thune to come 
to the floor and castigate Democrats for holding up Judge Gorsuch, who 
has just been nominated, and for suggesting we are going to filibuster, 
the fact is, throughout most of last year, we saw the Republican 
majority in this body hold up the nominee Merrick Garland, President 
Obama's nominee.
  For the first time in history, this body refused to hold a hearing on 
a nominee for the Supreme Court, refused to give an up-or-down vote, 
and to suggest that we should not get a fair hearing on the nominee to 
the Supreme Court--Judge Gorsuch--I think is just not someone who is 
going to be good for the American people.
  Unlike the Republican majority, I haven't heard any Democrats saying: 
We don't think that Judge Gorsuch should get a hearing or that he 
should get an up-or-down vote. Everybody I have talked to agrees he 
should get a hearing and an up-or-down vote.
  As for the time that it is taking us to review the nominees of this 
administration, the fact is, the Trump administration was delayed in 
putting forward nominees. They were much later than the previous two 
Presidents. We are still waiting for many of those nominees to provide 
the background information that is required for those positions to have 
the background checks done, to have the questions that have been put 
forward to them in hearings answered. So I think we should all work 
together to move these nominees. That is what I have done on the Small 
Business Committee as the ranking member, and we have worked very well 
because that nominee provided all the required information. She had the 
FBI background check done, and we were able to hold a hearing on her. 
Well, that is what we expect from every nominee.
  So I am disappointed to hear my colleague come down and say that we 
are not going to give Judge Gorsuch a fair hearing. I think we are 
going to do that, but we are going to do it in a way that provides 
information to the American people so we all know where this judge 
stands and what he thinks about the role on the Supreme Court.
  I think rather than name-calling, it would be more effective for us 
to work together to get this done.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I will just point out to the Senator from 
New Hampshire--perhaps she knows it, perhaps she doesn't, but her 
leader has suggested a 60-vote threshold for this nominee.
  I am delighted to hear her say that they are going to provide a 
hearing for consideration. I hope that she, like all of our colleagues, 
will provide this judge an opportunity to be heard, to respond to 
questions because I think they will find, as most of us who have looked 
at his record, that this is an exceptionally well-qualified judge. He 
is a very bright legal mind and somebody who I think understands what 
the role of a judge is in our constitutional democracy.
  With respect to the nominees we are considering, we are here right 
now, and the Senator from New Hampshire and some of her colleagues were 
here overnight last night stalling, if you will, to allow for votes on 
nominees that have been put forward by this administration.
  I don't think you can dispute the record. At this time 8 years ago, 
President Obama had 21 of his nominees in place. This President has 
seven. What I mentioned earlier, you have to go back to the time of 
Dwight Eisenhower, roll back to today, and every President from that 
point forward has had, on this day, all or most of their nominees in 
place and confirmed by the Senate. So there is no question. There is no 
question what is going on here.
  I am not calling anybody names. I am just pointing out what I see 
every single day; that is, foot-dragging and delays and obstruction 
trying to prevent a President--whom they, understandably, didn't like 
getting elected--from being able to get his team in place.
  All I am simply saying is I think the American people expect more of 
us, I think they expect better of us, and I think we have to answer the 
call to duty to allow that team to be put in place so this President 
and his team can go about the important business of governing this 
country.
  But you cannot dispute the facts with respect to the number of 
nominees who have been confirmed to date with this President and 
Presidents going back in history, and I said earlier, you have to go 
back to George Washington. I think that is accurate. I think you have 
to go back a long way in the annals of history to find any time where 
you see what is happening today happen in the Senate with any President 
historically of either party.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to talk about a 
couple of my friends. I want to say a few words and praise President 
Trump's nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the 
United States.
  I first met Judge Gorsuch several years ago when I met with several 
circuit court judges for a dinner. He was and has been impressive. 
Judge Gorsuch is an admirable choice to be America's next Supreme Court 
Justice. His many years of dedication to the law and service to 
America's judicial system clearly qualify him to serve on America's 
highest Court.
  His work itself speaks highly of his understanding of the 
Constitution and the values that we, as Americans, hold

[[Page 2033]]

dear. Some of the first signs Judge Gorsuch would be a great jurist 
happened just around the corner from here in Washington, DC, where he 
won a national debate championship in high school.
  He attended college at Columbia University and received a scholarship 
to attend Harvard Law School. As a new lawyer, he was back here in 
Washington learning from some of the best jurists in America. He 
performed clerkships first to the U.S. Supreme Court of Appeals for the 
DC district court and later for Justice Byron White and Anthony Kennedy 
at the U.S. Supreme Court.
  After working in private practice and at the Department of Justice, 
in 2006, President George W. Bush nominated Judge Gorsuch to serve as 
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit--that is my circuit. 
The Senate confirmed him by voice vote. Let me say that again. In 2006, 
this body was so confident about Neil Gorsuch, his character and his 
qualifications to serve as a Federal judge--yes, a circuit court 
judge--that he was confirmed without anyone even asking for a recorded 
vote. I consider that unanimous.
  On the bench of the busy Tenth Circuit, Judge Gorsuch has proven he 
takes seriously his duty to uphold the Constitution. He is known for 
his legal opinions that stridently defend our most fundamental 
constitutional rights and for writing those opinions in a way that is 
engaging and easy to understand.
  He knows that his work as a judge is about serving this institution, 
not his personal preferences. As he said recently at the White House, 
shortly after his nomination was announced by President Trump, ``A 
judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge 
stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.''
  I love that quote.
  As a uniquely exceptional scholar and respected jurist, not to 
mention a fellow westerner and avid outdoorsman who shares my love of 
fly fishing, he is the kind of man I trust to serve America on the 
highest Court of the land.
  I have met Judge Gorsuch, and he has a lot of support from folks in 
Wyoming, in the Wyoming legal community, and from both parties. I got 
calls from people of both parties saying he is the one we want to put 
up. I know and I trust those people, and I know and trust Judge 
Gorsuch, and I value those people's opinions. I believe he has a good 
understanding of the legal issues that matter to people in my home 
State.
  I would be remiss if I didn't state my disappointment in all the 
unproductive distraction about this pick by activists bent on 
politicizing the judicial nomination process. If their rhetoric and 
antics in the last days and weeks have told us anything, it is that no 
matter who President Trump nominated to fill the spot on the Supreme 
Court, they would have objected--no matter how learned, how objective, 
or how many hundreds of hours a nominee had already spent on the bench.
  In November, millions of people went to the polls and rejected this 
kind of tired partisan bickering when they voted for a change in 
Washington. Those same voters went to the polls knowing that there was 
a vacancy on the Supreme Court and that whoever became the next 
President would choose the nominee.
  Mr. President, among our most important duties, as Members of this 
body, is carefully vetting all nominees who come before us. Never is 
that responsibility so stark and so substantial as when our Nation 
faces a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
  I believe Judge Neil Gorsuch is up to the solemn and mighty task of 
serving as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. I look 
forward to a timely and fair confirmation process focused on Judge 
Gorsuch's qualifications.
  Now I want to talk a little bit about my other friend. I rise in 
support of President Trump's nominee to serve as the next Attorney 
General of the United States. That is my good friend and colleague 
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
  Senator Sessions is an admirable and appropriate choice to be 
America's next Attorney General. His many years of legal practice, his 
service as a U.S. attorney, and as Alabama's attorney general, and 20 
years of legislative service in the U.S. Senate have prepared him well 
to lead America's Department of Justice. His work itself speaks highly 
of his understanding of the Constitution, of his respect for the law, 
and of his reverence for the values that we as Americans hold dear. 
Jeff Sessions is qualified to be the next U.S. Attorney General because 
he spent decades studying and practicing the law.
  He grew up in a small town in Alabama and worked his way through 
college before studying law at the University of Alabama. Senator 
Sessions began his law practice at a small firm, where he worked on 
cases involving probate matters, domestic relations, criminal defense, 
real estate, wills, and civil litigation--what a combination.
  He then worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District 
of Alabama from 1975 to 1977. In that position, he handled a variety of 
cases at the trial level, including those related to wrongful death, 
gun violations, forgeries, bank robberies, drugs, and enforcing 
criminal penalties for pollution.
  I am not an attorney myself, but I understand those are exactly the 
kinds of cases that teach foundational legal skills to a young 
attorney--managing a docket that may include dozens of cases at any one 
time; working long hours to track down key evidence and witnesses; 
developing relationships with investigators and closely advising them 
to ensure relevant and admissible evidence is gathered lawfully; giving 
up nights and weekends to prepare witnesses, motions, and arguments for 
trial to get a case across the finish line; and conferring with victims 
to assure they are afforded the rights guaranteed to them by law.
  That kind of hard work and legal training paid off in 1981, when 
Senator Sessions was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve as 
the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. For the next 12 
years Jeff Sessions represented Federal agencies in legal 
controversies, prosecuted criminal cases, collected debts owed to the 
government, and defended the civil rights of U.S. citizens. He did this 
while also serving his country in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1973 to 
1986. He worked as a transportation officer and later as a military 
attorney, where the Army no doubt benefited greatly from his years of 
civilian legal training and practice.
  In 1995, Senator Sessions was elected attorney general for the State 
of Alabama, and he served for 2 years as the State's chief legal 
officer. Two years later he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
  I was first elected to the Senate in that same year, and Jeff 
Sessions has been my friend ever since. But I personally know the man, 
not just the Senator, and I believe him to be a caring person who wants 
justice for people and has compassion for people, no matter their 
backgrounds.
  During his 20 years in the Senate, Jeff Sessions has worked on many 
tough legislative issues that further qualify him to serve as Attorney 
General. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he has fought 
for the confirmation of judges committed to following the law. 
Consistent with his experience as a prosecutor, he has led successful 
legislative efforts to improve law and order, many times working with 
his colleagues across the aisle. He worked with another of my good 
friends, the late Senator Ted Kennedy, on legislation to reduce sexual 
assaults in prisons. He worked with Senator Durbin to pass legislation 
in 2010 to bring fairness to Federal drug sentencing and provide 
tougher penalties to repeat drug traffickers.
  But his efforts haven't been limited to the Judiciary Committee. As a 
member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he has been a strong 
advocate for America's military and for those who serve in it. In 2006, 
he worked with Senator Lieberman to pass a law increasing death 
benefits for family members of fallen combat personnel and to increase 
Servicemembers Group Life Insurance benefits.

[[Page 2034]]

  He has worked to restrain the growth of Federal spending and 
rebalance Federal funding for HIV/AIDS treatment through the Ryan White 
CARE Act. Those are just a few of his many legislative accomplishments 
as a U.S. Senator.
  Jeff Sessions is a well-educated attorney, an accomplished 
prosecutor, and a skilled legislator. But I also believe his character, 
work ethic, and temperament make him well-suited to serve as the chief 
law enforcement officer of the Federal Government.
  As I mentioned, he has been my friend and colleague for over 20 
years. So I am proud to personally attest to this. He is a man who is 
guided by his principles. He is very active in his family's church back 
in Mobile and in the entire Methodist community of Alabama. He and his 
wife Mary have raised three wonderful children who have given them ten 
grandchildren.
  I believe Senator Sessions has the experience, character, and drive 
to be a fantastic Attorney General. If confirmed, he is committed to 
strengthening partnerships between Federal and local law enforcement 
officers to fight crime, and, specifically, to take out drug cartels 
and criminal gangs. He has vowed to prosecute criminals who use guns in 
committing crimes. And he will prosecute individuals who repeatedly 
violate America's immigration laws.
  In November millions of voters went to the polls and voted for 
change. I believe the priorities Senator Sessions will pursue if 
confirmed as Attorney General are shared by those voters. I would note 
the many organizations and individuals who have endorsed his 
nomination, including the Fraternal Order of Police, the National 
Sheriffs' Association, and 25 State attorneys general. These are people 
at the frontlines of law enforcement, and I think they know what it 
takes to make a great Attorney General.
  Among our most important duties as Members of this body is to 
carefully vet all nominees that come before us. We have before us an 
opportunity to support the nomination of a man of high moral character, 
whose training, education, and professional experience make him 
extremely well-qualified to serve our country. I urge my colleagues to 
join me in supporting Senator Jeff Sessions to serve as our next U.S. 
Attorney General.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Ms. DUCKWORTH. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my debate time 
to Senator Schumer.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I yield one hour of the time under my 
control to Senator Booker.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. And I yield 30 minutes of my time to Senator Leahy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. And I yield 10 minutes of my time to Senator 
Klobuchar.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. I yield one hour under my control to Senator Murphy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues and 
make remarks on Senator Sessions' nomination to serve as Attorney 
General. I will be coming back later this evening to focus on voting 
rights and some of the other issues at hand--freedom of the press, 
antitrust. I am actually the ranking member on that subcommittee, and 
while Senator Sessions has assured me that if confirmed, he will keep 
the independence of that part of the Justice Department away from 
outside influence from the White House, I am very focused on that 
because I think we have seen a wave of mergers, and I want to address 
that more in depth later.
  I worked successfully with Senator Sessions on a number of UC's over 
the years such as adoption and human trafficking. We have worked 
together well, and if he is confirmed, I am sure we will find some 
areas of common agreement. I am not supporting him, however, and I have 
told him this in person and I have talked about it at the Judiciary 
Committee because of my concerns relating to some of his views on some 
of the core functions of the Justice Department, and that is enforcing 
voting rights, the handling of immigration issues, the freedom of the 
press, and the Violence Against Women Act.
  Now, he has assured me that he will keep the Office on Violence 
Against Women funded--which I appreciate--in the Justice Department, 
but I was very concerned that he had actually voted against the 
Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization recently. It was something 
that the majority of Republican Senators voted for and every single 
woman Senator, Democrat or Republican, voted in favor of.
  As a prosecutor and a U.S. Senator, one of my main criminal justice 
priorities has been enforcing and reauthorizing VAWA or the Violence 
Against Women Act. It is a bill that took roots in my State, thanks to 
the efforts on the initial bill of former Senator Paul Wellstone and 
his wife Sheila. Both of them tragically died in a plane crash, and we 
miss them very much. But Paul and Sheila's legacy lives on in the work 
of the Violence Against Women Act.
  It has a long history, as the President knows, of bipartisan support. 
Since it was first passed in 1994, we have made great strides in 
raising awareness that these are serious crimes, not shameful secrets. 
Since the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act, annual domestic 
violence rates have fallen by 50 percent, but the statistics make clear 
that domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault are still a major 
problem in America. According to data from the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention, for every minute, 20 people in the United 
States are victims of physical violence by an intimate partner. That is 
about 10 million people every year.
  Millions more individuals are the victims of stalking crimes each 
year, with approximately 15 percent of women at some point during their 
lifetime experiencing stalking, during which they feel very fearful or 
believe that they or someone close to them could be harmed or killed.
  I would like to note briefly that I am pleased that the Senate 
recently passed the resolution that Senator Perdue and I introduced on 
stalking to raise awareness. I have been confronted by these issues of 
domestic violence and stalking since before I became a Senator. In 
fact, that is when I was Hennepin County attorney. That is the largest 
prosecutor's office in our State. I managed an office of about 400 
people. With that big office handling everything from representing our 
State's biggest public hospital to violent murder cases, the poster 
that you saw when you walked into our office and down the hallway so 
that everyone could see it was a picture of a woman who was beaten up. 
She had a Band-Aid over her nose, and she was holding a little baby 
boy. The words read: Beat your wife, and it is your son that goes to 
jail. Why? That poster reminds everyone that domestic violence and 
sexual assault just don't hurt the immediate victims. They hurt 
children, families, and entire communities. We know that kids who see 
violence happen are twice as likely to commit it themselves and to 
continue the cycle. That is why I worked with Senator Leahy along with 
Senator Crapo to make sure that the Violence Against Women Act was 
reauthorized.
  What does this legislation do? The legislation ensures that law 
enforcement has the tools to prosecute domestic and sexual violence and 
ensures that victims have the support they need to get back on their 
feet. But we also made some important updates on the law, including 
addressing the problem of above average levels of domestic violence in 
tribal areas, by allowing tribal courts to prosecute and to handle 
cases with people who are tribal members and in very specific cases

[[Page 2035]]

when violence is committed on the reservation.
  Providing a uniform nondiscrimination provision was also included to 
ensure services are available to everyone who needs them, including 
victims in same-sex relationships. The new bill included stronger 
housing protections for victims and increased accountability for grant 
recipients. It also strengthened and updated anti-stalking laws to 
better address the new technologies that predators are using to harass 
their victims. This was a bipartisan provision that I authored with 
Republican former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
  As I said, all 20 women Senators supported this critical legislation, 
and it passed with bipartisan support on a vote of 78 to 22, with 
support from a majority of Senators in Senator Sessions' own party, not 
to mention men and women across the country.
  The reason Senator Sessions had for not voting for the bill was that 
it was the tribal provisions that he didn't like because of the dual 
jurisdiction. That just doesn't hold up for me, given what I have seen 
in my State.
  Now, what does this really mean to people? Let me end this portion of 
my remarks with two stories. The first is about a case that our office 
handled, and a prosecutor in our office who was very well thought of 
handled it in our office, involving two immigrants. This was a case 
where this man was from Russia, and he beat up his wife repeatedly over 
the years. They had a little daughter. One day he killed his wife, and 
then he went to Home Depot and he bought a saw. And then he basically 
dismembered her and put her in a garbage bag and brought her to another 
State and dumped her in a river. He left the head in his trunk, and he 
brought it back to the Twin Cities. He eventually confessed to his 
crime.
  The family gathered--and they were a very small family. The mom and 
dad came from Russia, and then there was the little girl who had been 
left behind with really no parent to take care of her anymore. I went 
to meet with the family before the funeral with our prosecutor and our 
victim witness advocate. I heard the story then that at the airport--
the little girl had never met her deceased mother's twin sister. They 
were identical twins. And as they got off the airplane and her 
grandparents and that aunt got off the airplane, the little girl ran up 
to that aunt and grabbed her and said ``Mommy, Mommy'' because she 
thought that it was her mother and that her mother was still alive.
  Those are the victims of domestic violence. It is not just the 
immediate victim; it is everyone around them.
  Or, the case in Lake City, MN, of Officer Shawn Schneider, an 
incredibly brave police officer who was called one day to a domestic 
violence case. It was a man who was clearly affected by mental illness, 
who was threatening his 17-year-old girlfriend, and the cop went up to 
the door, and there he was. He had his bullet proof vest on, but the 
man shot the police officer in the head, and he died. I attended that 
funeral.
  When I was there, I saw their young family, the two young little boys 
and this little girl. I heard the story about the last time they were 
in their church for the nativity play, and the dad was sitting there--
the police officer--in the pew, watching his family and his children 
perform. The next time they were in the church was when that little 
girl with the blue dress covered in stars was walking down the aisle 
for her dad's funeral.
  That is domestic violence. It does concern me that we did not get 
support from the nominee. I do appreciate that he said he would 
continue to fund the Office on Violence Against Women, and I believe 
that that is very important to the functioning of the Justice 
Department.
  Since its inception in 1995, the Office on Violence Against Women has 
provided financial and technical assistance to communities nationwide--
very important to the Department of Justice.
  The last thing I want to mention--and I will come back again to some 
of these other priorities that I think are important, if Senator 
Sessions is confirmed, to continue to be a focus in the Justice 
Department, as well as other concerns that I have--is the funding of 
the COPS program. Republican Senator Murkowski and I are leading that 
effort. We have always had, especially in the House of Representatives, 
bipartisan support for the COPS program.
  During Senator Sessions' hearing, I made a special note to discuss 
that issue with Chuck Canterbury, who is the president of the Fraternal 
Order of Police, and we had a good discussion about that. He stated 
that he shared my view that this is a very important program, 
particularly with the sharp decrease in staffing levels we have seen 
for law enforcement around the country in recent years, including 
training funding--something that is really important.
  The Community Oriented Policing Services, or the COPS program, was 
established many years ago. It helped to place more than 129,000 police 
officers on the beat in more than 13,000 State, local, and tribal law 
enforcement agencies. In fiscal year 2015, the COPS office was able to 
award grants to just 209 of the over 1,000 law enforcement agencies 
that applied. It translated into about 915 officers, which is still a 
lot, but, in fact, there were requests for over 3,000 officers.
  I think we can all agree, and hope the administration agrees, that 
this is a very important program. I will continue to work with Senator 
Sessions, if he is confirmed, to make sure we have the support from the 
administration for this program, which, again, is one of the top 
priorities of the Fraternal Order of Police and other police 
organizations across the country.
  I look forward to discussing other issues when I return, but for now, 
I yield the floor. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the nomination of 
Senator Jeff Sessions to be the next Attorney General of the United 
States and to head the U.S. Department of Justice.
  I have had the privilege to serve with Senator Sessions in the U.S. 
Senate for nearly a decade. I have served on several committees with 
him, including the years that I was on the Judiciary Committee. I no 
longer serve on that committee, but I served there with Senator 
Sessions.
  I was listening to Senator Klobuchar's explanations of her concerns. 
Senator Sessions is a person whom we work with, but it is his views and 
his record that give me great concern.
  Just looking back at the first 2 weeks of the Trump administration, I 
think a growing number of Americans understand the importance of the 
Constitution, the rule of law, the system of checks and balances, the 
separation of powers, and the critical importance of the position of 
the Attorney General of the United States.
  Over the years, the Justice Department has grown into one of the 
largest Cabinet departments, with over 100,000 employees, which touches 
just about every aspect of life in America today. It is known as the 
world's largest law office and the chief enforcer of Federal laws.
  Just think about the work every day to keep America safe undertaken 
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement 
Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and 
Explosives, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the 
U.S. Attorneys in every State and territory. Think about the work of 
the National Security Division that tackles some of the toughest 
terrorism and intelligence challenges we face every day. All of that 
comes under the Department of Justice. All of that comes under the 
Attorney General.
  Think about the work of the Civil Rights Division to protect all 
Americans, regardless of their background, to ensure that every 
American--every American--enjoys full constitutional rights and 
privileges. Think about the work of the Environmental and Natural 
Resources Division, the Antitrust Division, and the Tax Division, and 
so many other offices within the Department of Justice. It is the 
direction of all of those agencies that come under the Attorney General 
of the United

[[Page 2036]]

States. These hard-working employees of the Justice Department keep 
America safe every day while protecting American lives, and some of 
them put their lives on the line to do so. We need an Attorney General 
that will strengthen, not weaken, the Justice Department and will help 
carry out its important missions.
  The Justice Department is charged with ``[enforcing] the law and 
[defending] the interests of the United States according to the law,'' 
``[ensuring the] public safety against threats foreign and domestic,'' 
as well as ``[ensuring] fair and impartial administration of justice 
for all Americans.'' That is their mission. That is their 
responsibility.
  The Attorney General is not the President's lawyer; he or she is the 
people's lawyer. After carefully examining Senator Sessions' record--
including his Senate service, confirmation hearing, and advocacy on the 
campaign trail for Mr. Trump--I am not convinced that he would be 
independent and impartial to the President and Federal agencies. I am 
not convinced he would enforce the law fairly and protect the civil 
liberties and civil rights of all Americans.
  Let me discuss some of my concerns with Senator Sessions' nomination. 
In this debate, I do want to mention my resolution calling on President 
Trump to divest his interest and sever his relationship to the Trump 
organization. My resolution was first introduced last year. It is 
intended to uphold the value and strictures of one of the most sacred 
documents: the Constitution, the instrument that the President took an 
oath to preserve, protect, and defend. It makes clear that Congress 
will consider all transactions by foreign governments and their agents 
with the Trump organization as potential violations of the emoluments 
clause of the Constitution.
  The Attorney General is likewise sworn to uphold the U.S. 
Constitution and provide legal advice to President Trump and the 
various Cabinet departments. He must exercise independent judgment. I 
am concerned as to whether Senator Sessions would, in fact, advise the 
President, as he should, that by holding on to Trump enterprises--by 
not divesting or setting up a blind trust--he is putting himself at 
risk of violating the Constitution of the United States.
  It is not what the President wants to hear; it is what he must hear. 
We need an independent Attorney General in order to make that 
recommendation to the President of the United States.
  Senator Sessions has strongly supported restrictive voter ID laws 
that have had the effect of disenfranchising many otherwise eligible 
voters and are frankly modern-day poll taxes. He has called the Voting 
Rights Act intrusive as it seeks to protect minority voters. He praised 
the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a 
key part of the Voting Rights Act, saying that it was ``a good day for 
the South'' when the decision was handed down.
  Our next Attorney General should be working on how to expand the 
franchise, not restrict it. Now President Trump has said he will direct 
Vice President Pence to lead a task force or commission to examine so-
called voter fraud in the 2016 Presidential election.
  We need an independent Attorney General.
  Why is President Trump taking this action? Because Hillary Clinton 
won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, and that gets under his 
skin. He feels slighted. He feels his legitimacy is brought into 
question. It doesn't matter that he won the electoral vote. So the 
President will direct the Vice President, and presumably his next 
Attorney General, to investigate these bogus claims of voter fraud. 
Instead, the new Attorney General should examine voter suppression and 
disenfranchisement in the elections. I fear this new study on 
widespread ``voter fraud'' is simply a pretext to impose more onerous 
restrictions on the right to vote--to try to keep a certain segment of 
Americans--making it more difficult for them to vote because they may 
be more likely to vote for someone other than Mr. Trump. That is not 
what the Attorney General should be doing.
  Based on his record, Senator Sessions would work with the Trump 
administration to further restrict the right to vote and roll back the 
clock on this cherished civil right, which is protected by our 
Constitution.
  On the issue of immigration, Senator Sessions has a long record where 
he has fought against bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform in 
the Senate. He led the efforts in 2007 and in 2013 to defeat bipartisan 
legislation in the Senate. He used the untruthful ``amnesty'' tag to 
describe the tough-but-fair pathway to citizenship in this legislation, 
which passed by a 68-to-32 vote in 2013. He has opposed relief for the 
DREAMers and has opposed the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals--
DACA--program. He supported anti-immigration State laws in Arizona and 
elsewhere that the Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional.
  During the Presidential campaign, Mr. Trump issued a press release 
``calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the 
United States.'' Several days later, Senator Leahy offered a resolution 
in the Judiciary Committee that stated, ``It is the sense of the Senate 
that the United States must not bar individuals from entering the 
United States based on their religion, as such action would be contrary 
to the fundamental principles of which this nation was founded.'' The 
vote was 16 to 4 in favor of the Leahy resolution. Senator Sessions 
voted no and spoke against the resolution for nearly half an hour and 
concluded by stating that the Leahy resolution ``goes beyond being 
unwise. It is reckless. It is absolute and without qualification. It 
could have pernicious impacts for decades, even centuries to come. It 
may be even a step from the concept of the nation-state to the idea of 
`global citizenship.'''
  Barring a religious test of people coming into our Nation would 
create that type of a Nation? That is who we are as a Nation. Those are 
our core values. We embrace diversity.
  Senator Sessions' views are far outside the mainstream and would 
unsettle many years of law and precedent that protect individual 
religious beliefs. I am gravely concerned about how an Attorney General 
Sessions would advise President Trump on the lawfulness of a Muslim 
ban. He recently issued his Executive order, which a district court has 
put on hold and is now being challenged in the Ninth Circuit. I 
cosponsored legislation to rescind President Trump's discriminatory 
Executive order barring immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and 
suspending the U.S. refugee program.
  I am also concerned as to how Attorney General Sessions would advise 
the President on matters of immigration. Former Acting Attorney General 
Sally Yates was fired and her conduct was called shameful by President 
Trump, simply because she was upholding the Constitution, giving her 
advice. The President has criticized the ``so-called judge'' who 
temporarily stayed his travel ban with an ``outrageous'' decision, and 
said that the judge would be blamed if a terrorist attack occurred in 
the United States. The Attorney General has to be able to stand up to 
even the President with these reckless words and actions. We need an 
independent Attorney General who will uphold the Constitution and 
recognize that he is not the President's attorney, he is the people's 
attorney. I am not convinced that Attorney General Sessions would be 
that type of person.
  Senator Sessions led the opposition to the nomination of my fellow 
Marylander Tom Perez to be the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil 
Rights Division at the Department of Justice when President Obama 
nominated him in 2009. At the time, Senator Sessions said:

       I am also concerned Mr. Perez will not be committed to 
     fully enforcing our Nation's immigration laws, some I have 
     worked hard on. We need to create a lawful system of 
     immigration. . . . He previously served as the President of 
     the Board of CASA of Maryland, an immigrant advocacy 
     organization that has taken some extreme views and been 
     criticized by a number of people in the media. CASA of 
     Maryland issued a pamphlet instructing immigrants confronted 
     by the police to remain silent. CASA also promotes

[[Page 2037]]

     day labor sites. This is where people, often without lawful 
     status, come and seek work . . . and [they] oppose 
     restrictions on illegal immigrants receiving drivers' 
     licenses. He was President of the Board.

  That was Senator Sessions' quote. Senator Sessions also commented on 
Mr. Perez directly:

       I am concerned where Mr. Perez will be in this [running the 
     Department of Justice Civil Rights Division]. He has been 
     pretty active politically. When he ran for the Montgomery, 
     MD, county council he responded to a question asking, `What 
     would you like the voters to know about you?' Mr. Perez said: 
     `I am a progressive Democrat and always was and always will 
     be.' This is a free country and that is all right. I am just 
     saying, in all fairness, that statement makes me a little 
     nervous.

  Again, quoting from Senator Sessions. The Senate did right by my 
friend and colleague Tom Perez. He was confirmed by the Senate to the 
Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice by a 72-to-22 vote. 
Now, I understand people may have a reason to vote one way or the 
other, but the reasons stated by Senator Sessions in regard to Mr. 
Perez caused me great, great concern. Senator Sessions again opposed 
Mr. Perez when he was later nominated to be Secretary of Labor. In both 
of these cases, Senator Sessions' views were far outside the mainstream 
on Mr. Perez.
  As the senior Senator from Maryland, I know CASA of Maryland. I have 
been there. I have seen the people they service. They do extraordinary 
work to help the immigrant community. They are not a fringe advocacy 
group. While Mr. Perez is a progressive, he is a dedicated public 
servant, having been elected by the people of Maryland to the 
Montgomery County Council and appointed by President Obama to run the 
Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department and later the Labor 
Department. Mr. Perez worked to expand the right to vote, protect the 
rights of all Americans, and ensure American workers had a decent wage 
and employers treated their employees with fairness and respect.
  I fear Attorney General Sessions would turn back the clock on so many 
civil and worker rights that we hold dear as Americans.
  Senator Sessions opposed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate 
Crimes Prevention Act. Senator Sessions supported a constitutional 
amendment to ban same-sex marriages, opposed the repeal of don't ask, 
don't tell in the military, and harshly criticized the Supreme Court's 
recent decision legalizing same-sex marriages across the country. He 
harshly criticized the Court for redefining a ``sacred and ancient 
institution,'' and called the ruling ``part of a continuing effort to 
secularize, by force and intimidation'' the Nation. Once again, I fear 
an Attorney General Sessions would turn back the clock on LGBT rights 
to a time when individuals would no longer have the legal right to 
marry the person they love.
  Senator Sessions voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the 
Paycheck Fairness Act, title X funding for contraception, breast 
screening, and health services for low-income women, and 
reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. He voted to defund 
Planned Parenthood. I am concerned whether Senator Sessions would 
enforce equal rights and protection for women as our next Attorney 
General.
  Senator Sessions has consistently fought against criminal justice 
reform in the Senate and led the effort to defeat the recent bipartisan 
proposals that would modestly reduce sentencing disparities and ease 
ex-offenders' reentry into society.
  Senator Sessions opposed my Ramos and Liu blue alert act due to 
fiscal concerns, even though the legislation cost was scored at nominal 
or less than $1 million for implementation by CBO. Law enforcement 
agencies strongly supported my legislation, which was signed into law 
by President Obama in 2015. Blue Alert helps our law enforcement 
officers, those who are threatened or endangered or where there has 
been an incident. It gives law enforcement the opportunity to apprehend 
the suspect in a timely way. It scored nominal or less than $1 million, 
and was used by Senator Sessions to block this important tool to help 
our law enforcement officers.
  Senator Sessions has generally condemned the Department of Justice's 
use of its power to investigate law enforcement agencies accused of 
misconduct and a ``pattern and practice'' of violating civil rights, 
calling consent decrees that mandate reform following these 
investigations ``an end run around the democratic process.'' That 
causes me concern because that is an important part of what we are 
doing in my hometown of Baltimore.
  We had a major problem in the Freddie Gray episode. We requested a 
pattern and practice investigation. We are now working with the consent 
decree. The people of Baltimore and the people of Maryland are anxious 
to get this matter moving forward and are anxious to see this consent 
order bring a successful conclusion to that recommendation and 
investigation.
  Senator Sessions led the opposition to Senator Mikulski and my 
recommendation of Paula Xinis to be a U.S. district judge for the 
District of Maryland in the Judiciary Committee and on the floor. The 
Alliance for Justice provided an account of Paula Xinis' confirmation 
hearing, which I will quote from at length here.
  ``Turning to the nominee of the District Court of Maryland, Paula 
Xinis, Senator Sessions unleashed a line of accusatory questions 
suggesting that Xinis' career as a public defender and civil rights 
lawyer showed an `agenda' that she would invariably `bring to the 
bench.' The questions were absurd and unfounded, but they could not be 
dismissed as such. Instead, Mrs. Xinis had to patiently explain that 
protecting the rights of America's most vulnerable and disenfranchised 
had not left her tainted with disqualifying bias.''
  ``Senator Sessions felt compelled to verify that someone with Mrs. 
Xinis' professional background--which also includes time as a complaint 
examiner in the DC Office of Police Complaints--would not be biased 
against police officers. After asking her whether `police have a 
responsibility to try to maintain an orderly and safe environment for 
the people who live in a city' and whether a judge `should show empathy 
for the difficulties that police officers face as well as' for those 
who allege that police have violated their civil rights. Senator 
Sessions closed with this:''
  ``Can you assure the police officers in Baltimore and all over 
Maryland that might be brought before your court that they'll get a 
fair day in court, and that your history would not impact your 
decision-making? And I raise that particularly because I see your firm 
[Billy Murphy] is representing Mr. Freddie Gray in that case that's 
gathered so much attention in Maryland, and there's a lot of law 
enforcement officers throughout the state and they want to know that 
they don't have someone who has an agenda to bring to the bench--can 
you assure them that you won't bring that to the bench?''
  ``The implication is clear: If you defend people against criminal 
prosecutions, and especially if you represent people in civil rights 
cases against police, there is a presumption of bias that you must 
rebut before the Judiciary Committee. One wonders whether Senator 
Sessions has asked a prosecutor if she would bring to her judicial role 
an `agenda' against indigent criminal defendants or if a corporate 
defense lawyer would be biased against employees who allege unlawful 
discrimination or unpaid wages. I doubt very much he would ask that 
same question in that circumstance.''
  ``The depth of this double standard is underscored by Senator 
Sessions' invoking Freddie Gray in particular. Freddie Gray, of course, 
was fatally injured in Baltimore police custody after being arrested 
without cause. His death led to grand jury indictments for six officers 
on homicide and assault charges, and the Department of Justice opened a 
civil rights investigation. Under these circumstances, representing Mr. 
Gray's family hardly seems like an act of radical subversion that would 
call into question one's ability to be fair, but in Senator Sessions' 
view, any challenge to police authority can be done only in pursuit of 
some extralegal `agenda.'''

[[Page 2038]]

  Senator Sessions led the floor opposition to Paula Xinis. I am 
pleased to report she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and she is now 
one of our distinguished members of the District Court of Maryland, 
where she serves with great distinction.
  Senator Sessions was one of only nine Senators to vote against the 
Detainee Treatment Act, which contained the McCain-Feinstein amendment 
that prohibits ``cruel, inhumane, and degrading'' punishment for 
individuals in American custody. He has left the door open to 
reinstating waterboarding as needed. He has opposed shutting down 
Guantanamo Bay.
  These issues are critically important because we got word of a draft 
Executive order that would bring back these types of torture centers--
which are not only a stain on America's reputation, they are 
counterproductive and against our values and our law. We expect the 
Attorney General of the United States to speak out against such 
reprehensible types of proposals.
  Thomas Jefferson wrote: ``The most sacred of the duties of government 
[is] to do equal and impartial justice to all of its citizens.'' This 
sacred duty remains the guiding principle for the women and men of the 
U.S. Department of Justice, according to the Justice Web site. I would 
urge all of us to keep that in mind.
  I regret I do not have confidence that Senator Sessions will carry 
out this task so I must oppose his nomination.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Daines). The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I rise to express my strong opposition to 
the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions to serve as Attorney General of 
the United States.
  I ask: Where are the Senators who will say no to the nomination of 
Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General of the United States? I hope 
there are at least enough Senators here who understand that America is 
careening over a constitutional cliff and that all of us, regardless of 
political party, need an Attorney General who can be relied on to 
enforce the laws fairly and fight back against lawless overreach by an 
out-of-control President.
  On January 27, the world turned upside down for tens of thousands of 
people directly affected by President Trump's Executive order turning 
America's back on refugees around the world and immigrants from seven 
Muslim-majority countries.
  Last week, I recalled many of their stories. I spoke about students 
and professors, about mothers and children, about friends and 
neighbors, real people who were turned away, detained, or deported 
based solely on their religion or the simple fact that they were 
fleeing war. We all breathed a sigh of relief when a court temporarily 
halted that order, but we know the fight continues to permanently 
overturn this unlawful, unconstitutional, and deeply immoral Executive 
order.
  That isn't all that happened last week. Last week, the Acting 
Attorney General of the United States refused to defend President 
Trump's unlawful and unconstitutional Executive order so President 
Trump fired her. That is right, the President of the United States 
fired the Nation's top law enforcement officer for refusing to defend 
an unlawful, unconstitutional, and deeply immoral order.
  Last week, after days of slow-walking or ignoring judicial decisions, 
President Trump went on the attack. He raged against the judge who 
temporarily halted his order, calling him a so-called judge and 
questioning his authority to act. That is right. The President of the 
United States attacked the legal authority of an individual district 
court judge, lawfully appointed by George W. Bush and confirmed 
unanimously by the Senate, to pass judgment on Trump's Executive 
orders.
  These are dangerous times. At times like this, it is more important 
than ever that the Attorney General of the United States has the guts, 
the independence, and the good moral judgment to stand up to the 
President when he seeks to violate the Constitution and ignore the law.
  At his confirmation hearing last month, Senator Sessions claimed to 
be that person. I have to say, I wish it were true. I really do. I wish 
the President's campaign had been different. I wish his actions now 
were different. I wish we could give his nominees the benefit of the 
doubt, but I will not ignore the real world, as unpleasant as it is, 
and neither can anyone in this Senate.
  In the real world, Senator Sessions obviously isn't going to stand up 
to the President's campaign of bigotry. How could he? In the real 
world, Senator Sessions is one of the principal architects of that 
campaign.
  Senator Sessions made a special name for himself for being a 
particularly vitriolic opponent of commonsense immigration policies. He 
railed against legal immigrants. He attacked cities and States that 
focus on keeping their communities safe instead of serving as a 
national deportation force. He called Islam a toxic ideology and a 
threat to our Nation. Despite the plain language of the Constitution, 
Senator Sessions doesn't think that children born in the United States 
should automatically become citizens. He wants to round up and deport 
DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as kids. Does that all 
sound familiar? Well, it should because Senator Sessions was an early 
and energetic supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump, and the Senator 
played a key role in shaping what has become the most extreme, most 
divisive, and most dangerous immigration policies of any President in 
decades.
  Senator Sessions' radical views are not limited to immigration. On 
issue after issue, Senator Sessions has displayed open hostility to the 
rights of all Americans.
  He has made derogatory and racist comments that should have no place 
in our justice system.
  As a Federal prosecutor, he got involved in a voting rights case 
against those who were trying to help American citizens who were 
lawfully registered to vote. Yes, that is right--he brought a case 
against civil rights workers who helped African-American voters submit 
absentee ballots.
  While serving as Alabama's attorney general, he reportedly made 
numerous racist comments, including saying he thought the KKK was OK 
until he learned that they smoked weed.
  He called a White attorney representing Black clients in a civil 
rights case a disgrace to his race.
  He claimed that the NAACP and the ACLU were un-American.
  In a speech in 2006, he said: ``Fundamentally, almost no one coming 
from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming here because 
they have a provable skill that would benefit us and that would 
indicate their likely success in our society.'' According to Sessions, 
Dominicans come to the United States by engaging in fraud.
  Senator Sessions is also extraordinarily hostile to any effort to 
root out discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. 
According to Senator Sessions, marriage equality is a threat to the 
American culture.
  Roe v. Wade is constitutionally unsound.
  Employers should be able to fire you because they don't like whom you 
love.
  He voted against equal pay for equal work.
  He even voted against the Violence Against Women Act.
  It doesn't stop there. On crime, Senator Sessions' solution is to 
lock up people for even minor, low-level offenses; throw away the key. 
He has advocated for expanding prisons for youth, aggressively 
prosecuting marijuana offenses, and eliminating parole or reduced 
prison time for good behavior.
  During the 2016 Presidential campaign, he heaped praise on then-
candidate Donald Trump for having once taken out a racially tinged 
full-page newspaper ad advocating for the death penalty for the Central 
Park Five, the Black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused and 
convicted of raping a young woman in New York's Central Park.
  Senator Sessions is not a plain-old conservative Republican. No. 
Senator

[[Page 2039]]

Sessions occupies a place way out at the radical fringe of his party, 
regularly taking positions that are far more extreme than his other 
Republican colleagues. For example, when Republicans and Democrats came 
together to pass a commonsense, bipartisan immigration bill, Senator 
Sessions worked overtime to make sure the bill did not make it through 
the House. When Republicans and Democrats came together to propose 
legislation to reform our broken Federal criminal sentencing laws, 
Senator Sessions was part of the handful of Senators who ensured that 
the bill would not get a vote here in the Senate.
  Senator Sessions has been a public figure for decades. None of this--
none of this is secret, and much of it is completely indefensible, but 
President Trump wants this man. So the same Republican Senators who 
once fought Senator Sessions tooth and nail have now launched a massive 
PR campaign to try to repair his public image.
  That case against the civil rights workers helping Blacks in Alabama 
to vote? Hey, you go it all wrong. He was just trying to help out other 
African Americans who were concerned about voting irregularities.
  His vote against the Violence Against Women Act? His position on 
LGBTQ rights? His opposition to a woman's right to choose? Hey, don't 
worry about it. He says he will vigorously enforce the law once he 
becomes Attorney General. Give me a break.
  The law enforcement power of the United States of America is an 
awesome thing. In the right hands, in steady and impartial hands, it 
can be used to defend all of us, to defend our laws, to defend our 
Constitution. In the wrong hands, it can be used to bully and 
intimidate the defenseless, to destroy lives, to undermine American 
democracy itself.
  Senator Sessions is not misunderstood. Senator Sessions has never 
been misunderstood. For decades, it has been absolutely clear where he 
stands. Now the time is here for every Senator to make absolutely clear 
where they stand as well.
  Let's be clear. Winning a seat in the U.S. Senate does not exempt a 
Cabinet nominee from the close scrutiny that all nominees to lead our 
government deserve. It does not change the Senate's constitutional 
responsibility to examine a nominee to make certain that nominee will 
faithfully and fairly enforce the laws of the United States of America. 
It does not relieve the Senate of its duty to reject nominees whose 
records demonstrate that they will not stand up for American values and 
constitutional principles.
  When it comes to the Senate confirming someone to be Attorney 
General--the highest law enforcement officer in this country--we are 
all personally responsible for that choice. To put Senator Sessions in 
charge of the Department of Justice is an insult to African Americans. 
To put Senator Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice is a 
direct threat to immigrants. To put Senator Sessions in charge of the 
Department of Justice is a deliberate affront to every LGBTQ person. To 
put Senator Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice is an 
affront to women.
  I ask again, where are the Senators who will say no to Senator 
Sessions as Attorney General of the United States? Thirty years ago, a 
Republican-controlled Senate took the extraordinary step of rejecting 
Senator Sessions' nomination to serve as a Federal judge. They had the 
courage to stand up for the principles that transcend party 
affiliation--fairness, equality, justice for all. Their rejection sent 
a message that that kind of dangerous, toxic hatred has no place in our 
courts. I urge them again today to exert that moral leadership and to 
send a message that this kind of dangerous, toxic hatred has no place 
in our Justice Department. I urge them to set aside politics and do 
what they know is right.
  I wish to read two statements that really stood out to me as I was 
reviewing Senator Sessions' record on civil rights. One is the powerful 
speech that the late Senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, gave in 
1986, and the other is a very moving letter from Coretta Scott King, a 
letter she wrote to the Judiciary Committee that same year.
  I want to start with what Senator Kennedy said. He said:

       The confirmation of nominees for lifetime appointments to 
     the Federal judiciary is one of the most important 
     responsibilities of the Senate mandated by the U.S. 
     Constitution, and the examination by the Senate of a 
     nominee's fitness to serve as a Federal judge is the last 
     opportunity to determine whether the candidate possesses the 
     education, experience, skills, integrity, and, most 
     importantly, the commitment to equal justice under law, which 
     are essential attributes of a Federal judge.
       Once confirmed, a Federal judge literally has life and 
     death authority over citizens that appear before him, with 
     limited review of his decisions. Our Federal judiciary is the 
     guardian of the rights and liberties guaranteed to all of us 
     by the U.S. Constitution, and the decisions of fellow judges 
     are constantly shaping and reshaping those rights and 
     liberties.
       This committee has a duty to our citizens to carefully 
     examine the qualifications of nominees for the Federal bench 
     and to give our approval only to those who have demonstrated 
     a personal commitment to the principle of equality for all 
     Americans and a sensitivity to the long history of inequality 
     which we are still struggling to overcome.

  Mr. Sessions, as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of 
Alabama, comes to this committee with a record which regrettably 
includes presiding over the now-infamous so-called Perry County voting 
fraud prosecutions. In the Perry County case, the government indicted 
three well-known and highly respected Black civil rights activists on 
charges of voter fraud and assisting elderly Black voters to vote by 
absentee ballot. But for the efforts of the defendants 20 years ago, 
these Black citizens would not have been allowed to vote. All three of 
the defendants were acquitted on all charges in the indictments, and 
some of the elderly Blacks have responded to their experiences during 
the prosecution, vowing never to vote again. Mr. Sessions' role in that 
case alone should bar him from serving on the Federal bench.
  There is more--much more. We just received a sworn statement from a 
Justice Department attorney I know--which will be the subject of a good 
deal of questioning during the course of this hearing--who has worked 
on civil rights cases with Mr. Sessions over the period Sessions was 
U.S. attorney. Mr. Huber has stated to the committee investigators that 
Mr. Sessions on more than one occasion has characterized the NAACP and 
the ACLU as un-American, Communist-inspired organizations. Mr. Huber 
reports that Mr. Sessions said that these organizations did more harm 
than good when they were trying to force civil rights down the throats 
of people who were trying to put problems behind them. Mr. Huber also 
stated that Mr. Sessions suggested that a prominent White civil rights 
lawyer who litigated voting rights cases was a disgrace to his race for 
doing it. Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know 
both Black and White Americans thought was in our past.
  It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified 
to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a U.S. Federal judge.
  ``He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department, and he 
should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.'' Those were 
the words of Senator Ted Kennedy, and I will stand with Senator 
Kennedy, and, like he did, I will cast my vote against the nomination 
of Senator Sessions.
  Coretta Scott King also wrote to the Judiciary Committee about the 
Sessions nomination in 1986. This is what she wrote:

       Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
       Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to express my 
     strong opposition to the nomination of Jefferson Sessions for 
     a federal district judgeship for the Southern District of 
     Alabama. My longstanding commitment, which I shared with my 
     husband, Martin, to protect and enhance the rights of Black 
     Americans, rights which include equal access to the 
     democratic process, compels me to testify today.
       Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert 
     Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and 
     unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used 
     the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of 
     the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to 
     serve as a federal

[[Page 2040]]

     judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Mr. Sessions' 
     conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated 
     voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal 
     violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the 
     temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.
       The Voting Rights Act was, and still is, vitally important 
     to the future of democracy in the United States. I was 
     privileged to join Martin and many others during the Selma to 
     Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965. Martin was 
     particularly impressed by the determination to get the 
     franchise of blacks in Selma and neighboring Perry County. As 
     he wrote, ``Certainly no community in the history of the 
     Negro struggle has responded with the enthusiasm of Selma and 
     her neighboring town of Marion. Where Birmingham depended 
     largely upon students and unemployed adults [to participate 
     in non-violent protest of the denial of the franchise], Selma 
     has involved fully 10 per cent of the Negro population in 
     active demonstrations, and at least half the Negro population 
     of Marion was arrested on one day.''

  Mrs. King continues:

       Martin was referring of course to a group that included the 
     defendants recently prosecuted for assisting elderly and 
     illiterate blacks to exercise that franchise. In fact, Martin 
     anticipated from the depth of their commitment twenty years 
     ago, that a united political organization would remain in 
     Perry County long after the other marchers had left. This 
     organization, the Perry County Civic League, started by Mr. 
     Turner, Mr. Hogue and others, as Martin predicted, continued 
     ``to direct the drive for votes and other rights.'' In the 
     years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, Black Americans 
     in Marion, Selma and elsewhere, have made important strides 
     in their struggle to participate actively in the electoral 
     process. The number of Blacks registered to vote in key 
     Southern states has doubled since 1965. This would not have 
     been possible without the Voting Rights Act.
       However, Blacks still fall far short of having equal 
     participation in the electoral process. Particularly in the 
     South, efforts continue to be made to deny Blacks access to 
     the polls, even where Blacks constitute the majority of the 
     voters. It has been a long, up-hill struggle to keep alive 
     the vital legislation that protects the most fundamental 
     right to vote. A person who has exhibited so much hostility 
     to the enforcement of those laws----

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is reminded that it is a violation 
of rule XIX of the Standing Rules of the Senate to impute to another 
Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or 
unbecoming a Senator.
  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I don't think I quite understand. I am 
reading a letter from Coretta Scott King to the Judiciary Committee 
from 1986 that was admitted into the Record. I am simply reading what 
she wrote about what the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be a Federal 
court judge meant and what it would mean in history for her.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. This is a reminder--not necessarily what you 
just shared--however, you stated that a sitting Senator is a disgrace 
to the Department of Justice.
  Ms. WARREN. I think that may have been Senator Kennedy who said that 
in the Record, although I would be glad to repeat it in my own words.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The rule applies to imputing conduct or 
motive, through any form or voice, to a sitting Senator; form or voice 
includes quotes, articles, or other materials.
  Ms. WARREN. So quoting Senator Kennedy, calling then-Nominee Sessions 
a disgrace, is a violation of Senate rules? It was certainly not in 
1986.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. In the opinion of the Chair, it is, and the 
Senator is warned.
  Ms. WARREN. So let me understand. Can I ask a question, in the 
opinion of the Chair? I want to understand what this rule means.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will state her inquiry.
  Ms. WARREN. Is it the contention of the Chair, under the rules of the 
Senate, I am not allowed to accurately describe public views of Senator 
Sessions, public positions of Senator Sessions, quote public statements 
of Senator Sessions?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair has not made a ruling with respect 
to the Senator's comments. The Senator is following process and 
tradition by reminding the Senator from Massachusetts of the rule and 
to which it applies.
  Ms. WARREN. I am asking what this rule means in this context. So can 
I continue with Coretta Scott King's letter?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator may continue.
  Ms. WARREN. Thank you. I will pick up, then, with Mrs. King's letter 
to the Judiciary Committee when the Judiciary Committee was 
considering, not then-Senator Sessions, Nominee Sessions for a position 
on the Federal bench.
  She makes the point:

       However, Blacks still fall far short of having equal 
     participation in the electoral process. Particularly in the 
     South, efforts continue to be made to deny Blacks access to 
     the polls, even where Blacks constitute the majority of the 
     voters. It has been a long, up-hill struggle to keep alive 
     the vital legislation that protects the most fundamental 
     right to vote. A person who has exhibited so much hostility 
     to the enforcement of those laws, and thus, to the exercise 
     of those rights by Black people, should not be elevated to 
     the federal bench.
       The irony of Mr. Sessions' nomination is that if confirmed, 
     he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal 
     prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years 
     ago with clubs and cattle prods. Twenty years ago, when we 
     marched from Selma to Montgomery, the fear of voting was 
     real, as the broken bones and bloody heads in Selma and 
     Marion bore witness. As my husband wrote at the time, ``it 
     was not just a sick imagination that conjured up the vision 
     of a public official, sworn to uphold the law, who forced an 
     inhuman march upon hundreds of Negro children; who ordered 
     the Rev. James Bevel to be chained to his sickbed; who 
     clubbed a Negro woman registrant, and who callously inflicted 
     repeated brutalities and indignities upon nonviolent Negroes 
     peacefully petitioning for their constitutional right to 
     vote.''
       Free exercise of voting rights is so fundamental to 
     American democracy, that we can not tolerate any form of 
     infringement of those rights. Of all the groups who have been 
     disenfranchised in our nation's history, none has struggled 
     longer or suffered more in the attempt to win the vote than 
     Black citizens. No group has had access to the ballot box 
     denied so persistently and intently. Over the past century, a 
     broad array of schemes have been used in attempts to block 
     the Black vote. The range of techniques developed with the 
     purpose of repressing black voting rights run the gambit from 
     the straightforward application of brutality against black 
     citizens who tried to vote to such legalized frauds as 
     ``grandfather clause'' exclusions and rigged literacy tests.
       The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 
     voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique 
     used to intimidate Black voters, and thus deny them this most 
     precious franchise. The investigations into the absentee 
     voting process were conducted only in the Black Belt 
     counties, where blacks had finally achieved political power 
     in the local government. Whites had been using the absentee 
     process to their advantage for years, without incident. Then, 
     when Blacks, realizing its strength, began to use it with 
     success, criminal investigations were begun.
       In these investigations, Mr. Sessions, as U.S. Attorney, 
     exhibited an eagerness to bring to trial and convict three 
     leaders of the Perry County Civic League, including Albert 
     Turner despite evidence clearly demonstrating their innocence 
     of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, in initiating the case, Mr. 
     Sessions ignored allegations of similar behavior by whites, 
     choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by 
     blacks by his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions 
     sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors 
     and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the 
     civil rights movement in the 1960's. These were persons who, 
     realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, 
     had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality, 
     and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they 
     committed was being too successful in gaining votes.
       The scope and character of the investigations conducted by 
     Mr. Sessions also warrant grave concern. Witnesses were 
     selectively chosen in accordance with the favorability of 
     their testimony to the government's case. Also, the 
     prosecution illegally withheld from the defense, critical 
     statements made by witnesses. Witnesses who did testify were 
     pressured and intimidated into submitting the ``correct'' 
     testimony. Many elderly blacks were visited multiple times by 
     the FBI, who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a 
     grand jury in Mobile when they could have more easily have 
     testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These 
     voters, and others, have announced they are now never going 
     to vote again.
       I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions' conduct in 
     these matters. Such a review, I believe, raises serious 
     questions about his commitment to the protection of the 
     voting rights of all American citizens. And consequently his 
     fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right. 
     When the circumstances and facts surrounding the indictments 
     of Al Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue are 
     analyzed, it becomes clear that the motivation

[[Page 2041]]

     was political, and the result frightening--the wide-scale 
     chill of the exercise of the ballot for blacks, who suffered 
     so much to receive that right in the first place. Therefore, 
     it is my strongly-held view that the appointment of Jefferson 
     Sessions to the federal bench would irreparably damage the 
     work of my husband, Al Turner, and countless others who 
     risked their lives and freedom over the past twenty years to 
     ensure equal participation in our democratic system.
       The exercise of the franchise is an essential means by 
     which our citizens ensure that those who are governing will 
     be responsible. My husband called it the number one civil 
     right. The denial of access to the ballot box ultimately 
     results in the denial of other fundamental rights. For, it is 
     only when the poor and disadvantaged are empowered that they 
     are able to participate actively in the solutions to their 
     own problems.
       We still have a long way to go before we can say that 
     minorities no longer need to be concerned about the 
     discrimination at the polls. Blacks, Hispanics, Native 
     Americans, and Asian Americans are grossly underrepresented 
     at every level of government in America. If we are going to 
     make our timeless dream of justice through democracy a 
     reality, we must take every possible step to ensure that the 
     spirit and intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 
     Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution is honored.
       The federal courts hold a unique position in our 
     constitutional system, ensuring that minorities and other 
     citizens without political power have a forum in which to 
     vindicate their rights. Because of this unique role, it is 
     essential that the people selected to be federal judges 
     respect the basic tenets of our legal system: respect for 
     individual rights and a commitment to equal justice for all. 
     The integrity of the Courts, and thus the rights they 
     protect, can only be maintained if citizens feel confident 
     that those selected as federal judges will be able to judge 
     with fairness others holding different views.
       I do not believe Jefferson Sessions possesses the requisite 
     judgment, competence, and sensitivity to the rights 
     guaranteed by the federal civil rights laws to qualify for 
     appointment to the federal district court. Based on his 
     record, I believe his confirmation would have a devastating 
     effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also 
     on the progress we have made everywhere toward fulfilling my 
     husband's dream that he envisioned over twenty years ago. I 
     therefore urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to deny his 
     confirmation.
       I thank you for allowing me to share my views.

  Mrs. King's views and words ring true today. The integrity of our 
Justice Department depends on an Attorney General who will fight for 
the rights of all people. An honest evaluation of Jeff Sessions' record 
shows that he is not that person.
  My concerns regarding Jeff Sessions go far beyond his disappointing 
record on civil rights. Take immigration, for example. The Daily Beast 
published an article a few weeks ago entitled, ``Donald Trump's Refugee 
Ban Has Attorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions's Fingerprints All Over 
It.'' Here is what the article says:

       To longtime Jeff Sessions observers, the chaos that 
     unfolded in American airports on Saturday morning wasn't a 
     surprise. At all. Rather, the refugee ban was the predictable 
     culmination of years of advocacy from two of President Donald 
     Trump's most trusted advisors: White House Senior Advisor 
     Stephen Miller, and attorney general designate Jeff Sessions. 
     For years, Sessions and Miller--who was the Alabama Senator's 
     communications director before leaving to join the Trump 
     campaign--pushed research and talking points designed to make 
     Americans afraid of refugees.
       Press releases, email forwards, speeches on the Senate 
     floor--Miller and Sessions used it all to make the case 
     against Obama's refugee program was a huge terror threat. The 
     executive order Trump signed late in the day on Friday is 
     just the logical conclusion of their work.
       I started getting press releases that Miller sent on behalf 
     of Jeff Sessions in March 2013, shortly after I moved to D.C. 
     to cover Congress. The emails went to my Gmail, and kept 
     coming over the years--hundreds and hundreds of them. By the 
     time he left Sessions' office to join the Trump campaign, 
     Miller's press releases were legendary among Hill reporters: 
     There were just so many of them at all hours of the day, and 
     they never stopped. Some were lengthy diatribes; some were 
     detailed, homemade charts; some were one-liners; one was just 
     a link to Facebook's stock page on Google Finance with the 
     subject line, ``Does this mean that Facebook has enough money 
     now to hire Americans?''
       ``I wanted to put together a little book of the best emails 
     I ever sent,'' Miller told Politico last June. ``I spent 
     hours and hours of research on those.''
       Some of that research had serious methodological problems, 
     according to Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the 
     libertarian Cato Institute.
       ``Miller's work vastly overstates the threat of foreign 
     terrorists to the homeland,'' Nowrasteh said.
       He pointed to Miller's efforts to chronicle cases of 
     refugees implicated in terrorist activity. It is true that 
     some refugees in the U.S. have been indicted for terrorism-
     related crimes, Nowrasteh said. But instances of refugees 
     actually planning terror attacks on American soil, he added, 
     were vanishingly rare.

  ``Almost all the refugees that I was able to specifically identify in 
his set were trying to support a foreign terrorist organization, mostly 
Al Shabab in Somalia, by giving them money or something like that,'' 
Nowrasteh said. ``I don't know about you, but I think there's a big 
difference between sending a militia in your home country funds and 
trying to blow up a mall in Cincinnati.''

       The collective effect of Miller and Sessions' messaging was 
     to enthusiastically push a narrative that now dominates the 
     Trump administration: that refugees and other immigrants 
     steal Americans' jobs, suck up too much welfare money, 
     incubate terrorists in their communities and, overall, are a 
     big problem.
       The conclusion was always the same: The government should 
     let in far fewer refugees, and it should think twice about 
     welcoming Muslims.
       And now, that's exactly what Trump is doing.
       For instance, in one ``Dear Colleague'' letter that 
     Sessions co-authored with conservative Republican Rep. David 
     Brat--a letter Miller blasted out to his press list--the 
     would-be Attorney General ripped into the refugee program.
       ``There can be no higher duty as lawmakers than to keep our 
     constituents and their families safe,'' Brat and Sessions 
     wrote. ``Yet our reckless refugee programs, lax green card 
     and visa policies, utter failure to enforce rampant visa 
     overstays, along with our wide open southern border, put the 
     U.S. at grave and needless risk.''
       ``Grave and needless risk''--it is a view that clearly 
     informs Trump's decision to temporarily ban refugees.
       And a Miller press release, blasted out on November 25, 
     2015, included this ominous title: ``U.S. Issued 680,000 
     Green Cards to Migrants from Muslim Nations Over the Last 5 
     Years.''
       Sessions then forwarded that email to his email list on 
     Jan. 12, 2016, the day of Obama's final State of the Union 
     address, and added this note: ``Some numerical context for 
     any discussions of refugee policy that may arise tonight. As 
     further context, the top-sending country for migrants are 
     Iraq and Pakistan, according to Pew, `Nearly all Muslims in 
     Afghanistan (99%) and most in Iraq (91%) and Pakistan (84%) 
     support Sharia law as official law.'''
       The implication was clear as a bell: Muslim immigrants are 
     flooding into the U.S., and they are bringing Sharia with 
     them. Someone who agreed with Miller's assessment would do 
     what Trump just did.
       Just about any time a refugee living in the U.S. was 
     charged, implicated, or otherwise connected to terrorism, 
     Miller emailed his list about it.
       Another Sessions press release, sent jointly with Sen. 
     Richard Shelby, also included ominous intonations about 
     refugees and Muslims.
       ``Congress must cancel the President's blank refugee check 
     and put Congress back in charge of the program,'' Sessions 
     and Shelby said. ``We cannot allow the President to 
     unilaterally decide how many refugees he wishes to admit, nor 
     continue to force taxpayers to pick up the tab for tens of 
     billions of unpaid-for welfare and entitlement costs.''
       ``The omnibus''--

  Still quoting the letter from Senators Shelby and Sessions--

     would put the U.S. on a path to approve admission for 
     hundreds of thousands of migrants from a broad range of 
     countries with jihadist movements over the next 12 months, on 
     top of all the other autopilot annual immigration--absent 
     language to reduce the numbers,'' the release continued.
       That same statement also suggested that refugees were 
     robbing elderly Americans of their benefits.
       ``Refugees are entitled to access all major welfare 
     programs, and they can also draw benefits directly from the 
     Medicare and Social Security Disability and retirement trust 
     funds--taking those funds straight from the pockets of 
     American retirees who paid into these troubled funds all 
     their lives,'' Sessions and Shelby said.
       Now that Trump is president, those numbers are getting 
     reduced--and fast.
       Another foreboding subject line from Miller showed up in 
     reporters' inboxes on Nov. 20, 2015: ``ICYMI: Each 5 years, 
     U.S. issuing more new green cards to migrants from Muslim 
     nations the population of Washington, D.C.''
       Sessions also took to the Senate floor to argue that Muslim 
     immigrants are uniquely dangerous. On Nov. 19, 2015, the 
     Alabaman said the following about Muslims:
       ``It is an unpleasant but unavoidable fact that bringing in 
     a large unassimilated flow of migrants from the Muslim world 
     creates

[[Page 2042]]

     the conditions possible for radicalization and extremism to 
     take hold.''
       In the speech, Sessions argued that the U.S. should set up 
     safe zones in Syria where refugees could settle--instead of 
     allowing any of them into the United States. Miller emailed 
     reporters as Sessions spoke to highlight his argument. Now 
     it's Trump's position.
       At Breitbart, Julia Hahn covered Sessions' speech, in an 
     article headlined ``Afghanistan Migration Surging into 
     America: 99% Support Sharia Law.'' News broke earlier this 
     week that Hahn got a job in the White House as an assistant 
     to Trump and senior advisor Stephen Bannon.
       And on and on and on, for hundreds of emails, without even 
     a whisper of flip-flopping.
       Trump's crack-down on Muslims and refugees should not 
     surprise anyone. He is just taking his advisors' advice.

  Trump's Executive order sparked protests and resistance all across 
the Nation. People across the country and around the world are standing 
up to say that it contradicts our core values and that it violates the 
law.
  Massachusetts is on the frontlines of challenging this illegal and 
downright offensive Executive order. Last week, Massachusetts Attorney 
General Maura Healey joined a Federal lawsuit to challenge that 
Executive order. This is what she said. I am quoting Attorney General 
Healey:

       Harm to our institutions, our citizens, and our businesses 
     is harm to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. . . . The 
     President's Executive order is a threat to our Constitution. 
     Rather than protecting our national security, it stigmatizes 
     those who would lawfully immigrate to our State. With this 
     policy, our global universities, hospitals, businesses, and 
     startups and far too many students and residents have been 
     put at risk. On behalf of the Commonwealth, my office is 
     challenging the immigration ban to hold this administration 
     accountable for its un-American, discriminatory, and reckless 
     decision-making.

  In 2013, Senator Sessions voted against reauthorizing the Violence 
Against Women Act, a bill that expanded protections and services 
provided to victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
  There is a piece from the Bedford Minuteman that really tells the 
story of how sexual violence impacts Massachusetts. This is what it 
said: ``They are mothers, daughters, sisters, fathers, sons, and 
brothers.''
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the Senator has impugned the motives 
and conduct of our colleague from Alabama, as warned by the Chair.
  Senator Warren said Senator Sessions ``has used the awesome power of 
his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by Black citizens.''
  I call the Senator to order under the provisions of rule XIX.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I am surprised that the words of Coretta 
Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate.
  I ask leave of the Senate to continue my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. McCONNELL. I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator will take her seat.


                   Appealing the Ruling of the Chair

                              Quorum Call

  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I appeal the ruling of the Chair, and I 
suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll and the following 
Senators entered the Chamber and answered to their names:

                           [Quorum No. 3 Ex.]

     Daines
     Fischer
     Hatch
     Kennedy
     Klobuchar
     McConnell
     Warren
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. A quorum is not present.
  The clerk will call the names of absent Senators.
  The legislative clerk resumed the call of the roll and the following 
Senator entered the Chamber and answered to his name:

                           [Quorum No. 3 Ex.]

       
     Cornyn
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. A quorum is not present.
  The majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to instruct the Sergeant at Arms 
to request the attendance of absent Senators, and I ask for the yeas 
and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), 
and the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Sessions).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Carper), 
the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from California 
(Mrs. Feinstein), the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy), the 
Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Virginia (Mr. 
Warner) are necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Rounds). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 88, nays 3, as follows:

                       [Rollcall Vote No. 56 Ex.]

                                YEAS--88

     Alexander
     Baldwin
     Barrasso
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Booker
     Boozman
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Franken
     Gardner
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Grassley
     Harris
     Hassan
     Hatch
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Heller
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Kaine
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lankford
     Leahy
     Lee
     Manchin
     Markey
     McCain
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murray
     Nelson
     Paul
     Perdue
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Scott
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--3

     Rubio
     Toomey
     Wicker

                             NOT VOTING--9

     Carper
     Coons
     Cruz
     Feinstein
     Isakson
     Murphy
     Sanders
     Sessions
     Warner
  The motion was agreed to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. A quorum is present.


                   Appealing the Ruling of the Chair

  The question before the Senate is, Shall the decision of the Chair to 
hold the Senator from Massachusetts in violation of rule XIX stand as 
the judgment of the Senate.
  Mr. DURBIN. I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There is a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), 
and the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Sessions).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Carper), 
the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from California 
(Mrs. Feinstein), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the 
Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) are necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 49, nays 43, as follows:

                       [Rollcall Vote No. 57 Ex.]

                                YEAS--49

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Daines
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley

[[Page 2043]]


     Hatch
     Heller
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     McCain
     McConnell
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Shelby
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                                NAYS--43

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Casey
     Cortez Masto
     Donnelly
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Harris
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Hirono
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Manchin
     Markey
     McCaskill
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--8

     Carper
     Coons
     Cruz
     Feinstein
     Isakson
     Sanders
     Sessions
     Warner
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The decision of the Chair stands as the 
judgment of the Senate.
  The Democratic leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I yield 1 minute to the Senator from 
Maine.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
  Mr. KING. Mr. President, Parliamentary inquiry.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will state his inquiry.
  Mr. KING. In the opinion of the Chair, would one Senator calling 
another Senator a liar during debate on the floor of the Senate be a 
violation of rule XIX?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. In the opinion of the Chair, it would.
  Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield back.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Here is what transpired. Senator Warren was giving a 
lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. 
She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
  Ms. HARRIS. Mr. President, the suggestion that reciting the words of 
the great Coretta Scott King would invoke rule XIX and force Senator 
Warren to sit down and be silent is outrageous.


                       Motion to Proceed in Order

  Mr. President, I move that the Senator from Massachusetts be 
permitted to proceed in order.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz) and the Senator from Alabama (Mr. 
Sessions).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Carper), 
the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from California 
(Mrs. Feinstein), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the 
Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) are necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 43, nays 50, as follows:

                       [Rollcall Vote No. 58 Ex.]

                                YEAS--43

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Casey
     Cortez Masto
     Donnelly
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Harris
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Hirono
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Manchin
     Markey
     McCaskill
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                                NAYS--50

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Daines
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heller
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     McCain
     McConnell
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Shelby
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--7

     Carper
     Coons
     Cruz
     Feinstein
     Sanders
     Sessions
     Warner
  The motion was rejected.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, if the average American heard someone 
read a letter from Coretta Scott King that said what it said, they 
would not be offended. They would say that is someone's opinion; that 
is all.
  It seems to me that we could use rule XIX almost every day on the 
floor of the Senate. This is selective enforcement, and another example 
of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle escalating the 
partisanship and further decreasing comity in the Senate.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have a question. I guess it is in 
the nature of a parliamentary question, and that is, whether it would 
be in order to ask unanimous consent that the letter from which Senator 
Warren read be put into the Record as a confirmation that she was, in 
fact, accurately reading from the letter, that it be added as an 
exhibit in the Congressional Record.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The text of the letter is in the Record of the 
Senate as the Senator was reading it in her testimony.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The text of the letter as she read it, but not the 
complete letter.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator may ask consent.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the complete letter from 
which Senator Warren read be printed in the Congressional Record to 
confirm that she has in fact read from it.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. RISCH. I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, this is fascinating. I say to my 
colleagues, I have served here longer than any other Member of this 
body. I have been here 42 years. I have been here when the Democrats 
were in the majority and when the Republicans were in the majority, 
with Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents. I have never, 
ever seen a time when a Member of the Senate asked to put into the 
Record a letter especially by a civil rights icon and somebody 
objected. It has always been done.
  I have had letters that people have asked to be put in that were 
contrary to a position that I might take. Of course, I would not 
object. They are allowed to do it. I have seen letters when Members of 
both sides of the aisle have debated back and forth and the other side 
would put in letters that were contrary to their opponents' positions, 
and of course nobody objected.
  Don't let the Senate turn into something it has never been before. I 
would hope that cooler heads would prevail, and we go back to the 
things that made the Senate great, that made the Senate the conscience 
of the Nation, as it should be.
  I have never once objected to a Senator introducing a letter, even 
though they took a position different than mine. I have never known of 
a Republican Senator to do that, and here we are talking about a letter 
from a civil rights icon.
  Let's not go down this path. It is not good for the country. It is 
not good for the Senate, it is not good for democracy, and it sure as 
heck is not good for free speech.
  I admire the Senator from Rhode Island. He is a man of great 
integrity, a man who was attorney general of his State and U.S. 
attorney in his State.

[[Page 2044]]

His request was something that is normally accepted automatically. I 
would hope Senators would reconsider.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, I am the one who entered the objection, and 
let me say to my good friend from Vermont that I agree with him 100 
percent that we should get back to what made the Senate great.
  We have rules around here, and the rules are very clear that you 
don't impugn another Senator. Now, you can't do that in your words and 
you can't do it with writings. You can't hold up a writing that impugns 
another Senator and say: Well, this is what somebody else said. I am 
not saying it, but that is OK.
  It is not OK. It is a violation of the rules, and we should get back 
to what made this Senate great, and that is, to stay within the rules, 
stay within civility, and not impugning another Senator, whether it is 
through words or whether it is through writings.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I have a parliamentary inquiry as well.
  The first question, Mr. President, is this: It is my understanding 
that the ruling of the Chair was based on the advice of the 
Parliamentarian. Is that accurate, Mr. President; on the advice of the 
Parliamentarian that the rule had been violated?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. No. The Chair sustained the ruling of the 
majority leader on his own.
  Mr. RUBIO. OK. The second question I have, Mr. President: Does the 
rule say anything that impugns another Member of the Senate, directly 
or indirectly? Is that an accurate reading of the rule?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct, and I will read the 
paragraph. This is rule XIX, section 2.

       No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any 
     form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators 
     any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

  Mr. RUBIO. Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. MERKLEY. A parliamentary inquiry.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. State your question.
  Mr. MERKLEY. If a Member of the Senate is being considered for 
nomination, and we are exercising our advice and consent power, and if 
there is factual conduct in that individual's background that is 
presented on the floor that is uncomplimentary, would presenting the 
facts of that conduct in the process of debating an individual be 
considered in violation of rule XIX?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The rule makes no distinction between those 
Senators who are nominees and those who are not. The rule does not 
permit truth to be a defense of the slight.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, just to make sure I understand that 
clearly, if we are considering a nominee who happens to be a Senator 
and we state factual elements of their background, for example, the 
conviction of a crime that is inappropriate conduct in the past, 
stating the factual record about an individual would be considered in 
violation of rule XIX?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Each of these cases will be decided by the 
Presiding Officer in the context at that time.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Just to clarify, if I could, therefore, the point is 
that something could be absolutely true, as, perhaps, a point that was 
made earlier--a statement can be true in a letter that is presented--
but even if it is true and accurate for a person under consideration 
for a nomination, it would still be in violation. In other words, the 
fact that an individual is found in violation of rule XIX doesn't mean 
that the statement had to be false. It could have been a true 
statement?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. You are correct, Senator.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant Republican leader.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I just want the Record to be abundantly 
clear. The language that resulted in the vote that we had invoking rule 
XIX was related to a quotation from Senator Ted Kennedy that called the 
nominee ``a disgrace to the Justice Department, and he should withdraw 
his nomination and resign his position.'' That was the quote. Our 
colleagues want to try to make this all about Coretta Scott King and it 
is not. I think the complete context should be part of the Record.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Parliamentary inquiry.
  Mr. SCHUMER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, it is my understanding--I was not there--
that there was a warning over Senator Kennedy's letter, but the actual 
ruling was based on Coretta Scott King's letter; is that correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes, that is correct.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, pursuing Senator Merkley's 
hypothetical, if it came before the Senate that a Member of the Senate 
who was a nominee seeking the advice and consent of the Senate to the 
position was, for example, in fact, a horse thief, and we found the 
fact that he was a horse thief to be relevant to whether or not he 
should be confirmed, say, to the Department of Interior, which has 
authority over lands, does the ruling of the Chair mean that it would 
not be in order for the Senate or for Senators to consider what in my 
hypothetical is the established fact that the Senator was a horse thief 
as we debate his nomination here on the floor?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Once again, the answer is the same, that each 
of these decisions will be made at the time and in the context in which 
they occur, and the decision of the Chair is subject to a vote of the 
Senate and an appeal.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I guess, Mr. President, what I don't understand is 
that we have fairly significant responsibilities under the Constitution 
to provide advice and consent. It appears that the ruling of the Chair 
has just been that when a Member of this body is the subject of that 
advice and consent, then derogatory information about that person is 
not in order and is a violation of rule XIX on the Senate floor. And 
with that being the ruling, I don't know how we go about doing our 
duties. Are we supposed to simply blind ourselves to derogatory 
information, discuss it privately in the cloak rooms, not bring it out 
onto the floor of the U.S. Senate, this supposedly great debating 
society that actually has a constitutional responsibility to discuss 
both the advantages and the deficits of a particular nominee?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. In each case, it is the opinion of the 
President, subject to the final vote by the Senate to support or not to 
support the President's decision.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So the precedent going forward is that any Senator 
who discusses derogatory information that is a matter of public record, 
that may even include criminal behavior by a Senator who is a candidate 
for Executive appointment that requires advice and consent, is at risk 
of being sanctioned by this body by a simple partisan majority of this 
body under rule XIX if they raise those issues on the floor?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. It is not necessary for a point of order to be 
raised under rule XIX, but if the point of order is raised, an opinion 
will be made and it is subject to a vote of the Senate in the manner 
previously described.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I first have a parliamentary inquiry. These 
are the continuing rules of the Senate that have been in existence 
previous to this time and have carried over into this session, is that 
correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.

[[Page 2045]]


  Mr. RUBIO. The reason I ask that is the following--but I think we all 
feel very passionate about the issues before us. I have not been here 
as long as Senator Leahy, whose service has been quite distinguished 
over a long period of time. I truly do understand the passions people 
bring to this body. I like to think that I, too, am passionate about 
the issues before us.
  I think this is an important moment. It is late. Not many people are 
paying attention. I wish they would though because I think the question 
here is one of the reasons I ran for this body to begin with. Maybe it 
is because of my background; I am surrounded by people who have lost 
freedoms in places where they are not allowed to speak. One of the 
great traditions of our Nation is the ability to come forward and have 
debates.
  But the Founders and the Framers and those who established this 
institution and guided us over two centuries understood that that 
debate was impossible if, in fact, the matter became of a personal 
nature. I don't believe that was necessarily the intention here, 
although perhaps that was the way it turned out. But I think it is 
important for us to understand why that matters so much.
  I want people to think about our politics here in America because I 
am telling you guys, I don't know of a single Nation in the history of 
the world that has been able to solve its problems when half the people 
in the country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that 
country. This is the most important country in the world, and this body 
cannot function if people are offending one another, and that is why 
those rules are in place.
  I was not here when Secretary Clinton was nominated as a Member of 
this body at the time, but I can tell you that I am just barely old 
enough to know that some very nasty things have been written and said 
about Senator Clinton. And I think the Senate should be very proud that 
during her nomination to be Secretary of State--despite the fact that I 
imagine many people were not excited about the fact that she would be 
Secretary of State--to my recollection, and perhaps I am incorrect, not 
a single one of those horrible things that have been written or said 
about her, some of which actually did accuse her of wrongdoing, was 
uttered on the floor of the Senate.
  I happen to remember in 2004 when then-Senator Kerry ran for 
President. Some pretty strong things were written and said about him. I 
was here for that when he was nominated and confirmed to be Secretary 
of State. And I don't recall a single statement being read into the 
Record about the things that have been said about him.
  Now, I want everybody to understand that at the end of the night, 
this is not a partisan issue. It really is not. I can tell you this 
with full confidence that if one of my colleagues on this side of the 
aisle had done that, I would also like to think that I would have been 
one of those people objecting, and here is why.
  Turn on the news and watch these parliaments around the world where 
people throw chairs at each other and throw punches, and ask yourself: 
How does that make you feel about those countries? It doesn't give you 
a lot of confidence about those countries. I am not arguing that we are 
anywhere near that tonight, but we are flirting with it. We are 
flirting with it in this body, and we are flirting with it in this 
country. We are becoming a society incapable of having debates anymore.
  In this country, if you watch the big policy debates that are going 
on in America, no one ever stops to say: I think you are wrong. I 
understand your point of view. I get it. You have some valid points, 
but let me tell you why I think my view is better. I don't hear that 
anymore.
  Here is what I hear almost automatically--and let me be fair--from 
both sides of these debates. Immediately, immediately, as soon as you 
offer an idea, the other side jumps and says that the reason you say 
that is because you don't care about poor people, because you only care 
about rich people, because you are this or you are that or you are the 
other. And I am just telling you guys, we are reaching a point in this 
Republic where we are not going to be able to solve the simplest of 
issues because everyone is putting themselves in the corner where 
everyone hates everybody.
  Now I don't pretend to say that I am not myself from time to time in 
heated debates outside of this forum. I have been guilty of perhaps 
hyperbole, and for those--I am not proud of it.
  But I have to tell you, I think what is at stake here tonight and as 
we debate moving forward is not simply some rule but the ability of the 
most important Nation on Earth to debate in a productive and respectful 
way the pressing issues before us. I just hope we understand that 
because I have tremendous respect for the other Chamber, and I 
understand that it was designed to be different. But one of the reasons 
I chose to run for the Senate and, quite frankly, to run for reelection 
is that I believed I served with 99 other men and women who deeply love 
their country, who have different points of view, who represent men and 
women who have different views from the men and women whom I may 
represent on a given issue and who are here to advocate for their 
points of view, never impugning their motives.
  One of the things I take great pride in--and I tell this to people 
all the time--is that the one thing you learn about the Senate is, 
whether you agree with them or not, you understand why every single one 
of those other 99 people are here. They are intelligent people, they 
are smart people, they are hard-working people. They believe in what 
they are saying, and they articulate it in a very passionate and 
effective way.
  When I see my colleague stand up and say something I don't agree 
with, I try to tell myself: Look, I don't understand why they stand for 
that, but I know why they are doing it. It is because they represent 
people who believe that.
  I am so grateful that God has allowed me to be born, to live, and to 
raise my family in a nation where people with such different points of 
view are able to debate those things in a way that doesn't lead to war, 
that doesn't lead to overthrows, that doesn't lead to violence. And you 
may take that for granted.
  All around the world tonight, there are people who, if they stood up 
here and said the things that we say about the President or others in 
authority, they would go to jail. I am not saying that is where we are 
headed as a nation; I am just saying, don't ever take that for granted.
  The linchpin of that is this institution. The linchpin of that debate 
is the ability of this institution through unlimited debate and the 
decorum necessary for that debate to be able to conduct itself in that 
manner.
  I know that tonight was probably a made-for-TV moment for some 
people. This has nothing to do with censuring the words of some great 
heroes. I have extraordinary admiration for the men and women who led 
the civil rights effort in this country, and I am self-conscious or 
understanding enough to know that many of the things that have been 
possible for so many people in this country in the 21st century were 
made possible by the sacrifices and the work of those who came before 
us.
  This has to do with a fundamental reality, and that is that this body 
cannot carry out its work if it is not able to conduct debates in a way 
that is respectful of one another, especially those of us who are in 
this Chamber together.
  I also understand this: If the Senate ceases to work, if we reach a 
point where this institution--given everything else that is going on in 
politics today, where you are basically allowed to say just about 
anything, for I have seen over the last year and a half things said 
about people, about issues, about institutions in our republic that I 
never thought I would see ever--ever. If we lose this body's ability to 
conduct debate in a dignified manner--and I mean this with no 
disrespect to anyone else. I don't believe anyone came on the floor 
here tonight saying: I am going to be disrespectful on purpose and turn 
this into a circus. But I am just telling you that if this body loses

[[Page 2046]]

the ability to have those sorts of debates, then where in this country 
is that going to happen? In what other forum in this Nation is that 
going to be possible?
  So I would just hope everybody would stop and think about that. I 
know I have been here only for 6 years, so I don't have a deep 
reservoir of Senate history to rely on. But I know this: If this body 
isn't capable of having those debates, there will be no place in this 
country where those debates can occur. I think every single one of us, 
to our great shame, will live to regret it.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I don't want to prolong this much more. 
In light of what my friend from Florida said, I would just reread what 
I said earlier.
  If average Americans heard someone read a letter from Coretta Scott 
King that said what it said, they would not be offended. They would say 
that is someone's opinion. That is all.
  It seems to me we could use rule XIX almost every day on the floor of 
the Senate, as my colleague from Maine so pointedly and piquantly 
exhibited a few minutes ago.
  This selective enforcement is another example of our colleagues on 
the other side of the aisle escalating the partisanship and further 
decreasing the comity of the Senate, which I treasure as well. This was 
unnecessary.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I take umbrage with what the minority 
leader said. I sat here and listened to the distinguished Senator from 
Massachusetts, who went on and on and on. Many of her remarks were 
criticizing a fellow colleague in the Senate. I don't know about the 
other side, but I find it offensive for either side to be criticizing, 
as was done here tonight, a sitting Member of the Senate.
  I am absolutely astounded that the Democrats, my friends on the other 
side, have taken to the war tables a desire to defeat Jeff Sessions. I 
have been here a long time, and I have to say that I knew Jeff Sessions 
even before he came here, and I have known him since he has been here. 
And, yes, I differ with him on a number of issues, but I would never 
say things about him as have been said by my colleagues on the other 
side. I think that we all ought to take some stock in what we are doing 
here.
  Jeff Sessions is a very fine person. Think of his wife. She is a 
really fine person. Jeff has been here 20 years. He has interchanged 
with almost all of us. Sometimes you agree with him, and sometimes you 
disagree with him, but he has always been a gentleman. He has always 
been kind and considerate of his colleagues. I can't name one time when 
he wasn't. Yet we are treating him like he is some terrible person who 
doesn't deserve to be chosen by the current President of the United 
States to be Attorney General of the United States.
  I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves--I really do--on both 
sides. And frankly, we have to get to where everything is not an issue 
here. I know some of my friends on the other side and I have chatted, 
and they are not happy with the way this body is going with good 
reason.
  Everything doesn't have to lead to a gun fight on the floor, but that 
is where we are going. And frankly, sometimes there is an awful lot of 
politics being played here on both sides.
  Look, I happen to like the senior Senator from Massachusetts. I think 
she is an intelligent, lovely woman in many ways. But I have to tell 
you, I listened to her for quite a while, and she didn't have a good 
thing to say about a fellow Senator. Frankly, I don't think that is 
right. If we don't respect each other, we are going down a very steep 
path to oblivion.
  I would hope that both sides would take stock of these debates. We 
can differ. We understand that the Democrats are not happy with the 
current President. We are happy with him. We can differ on that, and we 
can fight over various issues and so forth. But to attack a fellow 
Senator without reservation seems to me the wrong thing to do.
  It may not have risen to the level of a violation of the rules, but I 
think it comes close, and I have sat here and listened to most of it 
and, frankly, I don't believe that the distinguished Senator from 
Massachusetts was right in any respect. I have been here a long time 
and I have seen some pretty rough talk, but never like we have had this 
first couple of months here. We have gone so far on both sides that we 
are almost dysfunctional.
  I admit it was tough for the Democrats to lose the Presidential 
election. Most people thought that Hillary Clinton would win. I was not 
one of them. I thought there was a real chance because I knew a lot of 
people would not say for whom they were going to vote. I think, 
correctly, I interpreted that meant that they were going to vote for 
Donald Trump, and the reason they were is that they are tired of what 
is going on. They are tired of what is hurting this country. They are 
tired of the picayune little fights that we have around here.
  I think we have to grow up. I suggest that all of us take stock of 
ourselves and see if we can treat each other with greater respect. I 
have to say, I resented--as much as I like the distinguished Senator 
from Massachusetts, I resent the constant diatribe against a fellow 
Senator. Even if everything she said was true, it wasn't the right 
thing to do. I don't think any of us should do that to them, either. We 
can differ, we can argue, we can fight over certain words and so forth, 
but I have been appalled at the way the Democrats have treated Jeff 
Sessions. I have found Jeff Sessions--having worked with him for 20 
years and having disagreed with him on a number of things--to be a 
gentleman in every respect and to present his viewpoints in a 
reasonable and decent way.
  I would hope that my colleagues on the other side would consider 
voting for Jeff Sessions or at least treating him with respect.
  I admit that I think some of this comes from the fact that they are 
very upset at Donald Trump, and it is easy to see why. He won a very 
tough, contested election against one of their principal people. That 
is hard to take, maybe. That doesn't justify what has been going on 
against Jeff Sessions.
  We ought to be proud that Jeff has a chance to become the Attorney 
General of the United States, and he is going to be. That is the thing 
that really bothers me. Everybody on the other side knows that we have 
the votes to finally do this. Yet, they are treating it as though this 
is something that they have to try and win--which they are not going to 
win--and, in the process, treating a fellow Senator with disdain. It is 
wrong.
  We should all take stock of ourselves. I am not accusing my 
colleagues of not being sincere, but they have been sincerely wrong. I 
am personally fed up with it. If we want to fight every day and just go 
after each other like people who just don't care about etiquette and 
courtesy, I guess we can do that, but I think it is the wrong thing to 
do.
  I hope all of us will stop, take note of what has been going on, and 
on both sides start trying to work together. I know it was tough for my 
Democrat friends to lose the Presidential election. I know that was 
tough. And they didn't think they were going to, and, frankly, a lot of 
us didn't think they were going to. I did think that. But, then again, 
I was one of two Senators who supported Donald Trump, in my opinion, 
with very, very good reason. I am sure that doesn't convince any 
Democrats on the other side.
  The fact is that we have to treat each other with respect or this 
place is going to devolve into nothing but a jungle, and that would 
truly be a very, very bad thing.
  I am not perfect, so I don't mean to act like I am, but I have to say 
that all of us need to take stock. We need to start thinking about the 
people on the other side. We need to start thinking about how we might 
bring each other together in the best interests of our country and how 
we might literally elevate the Senate to the position that we all hope 
it will be.
  I love all of my colleagues. There is not one person in this body 
that I don't

[[Page 2047]]

care for a lot. I disagree quite a bit with some of my colleagues on 
the other side, and even some folks on our side, but that doesn't mean 
that I have to treat them with disrespect.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I first want to say a few words about 
the Senator from Massachusetts and her passion and what she has brought 
to this Chamber. While I know she has not been allowed to complete her 
remarks today, I know that will not silence her, and we look forward to 
hearing from her tomorrow and many days in the future on so many 
topics.
  I also wanted to say something about my friend from Utah. We have 
worked together on so many bills. I have seen firsthand that he means 
what he says about treating this Chamber with the dignity that we all 
deserve and that the American people deserve.
  Also, I was especially impressed by the words from the Senator from 
Florida. When I see the majority leader and the Democratic leader over 
there talking in the corner now, I think that is a good sign, because I 
have never seen a time where the Senate is more important, as the 
Senator from Florida was mentioning.
  This is a moment in time where the Senate will not just be a check 
and balance, but it is also a place for compromise. The one issue where 
I would differ slightly with my friend and colleague from Utah is that 
this isn't just about Democrats responding with surprise or anger to 
the election of a new President. There have been a lot of things said 
in the last few months, including calling judges ``so-called judges'' 
and some of the discussions and comparisons to foreign leaders, and 
things that we have heard from the White House in the last few weeks, 
including the order that was issued that some of our Republican 
colleagues expressed a lot of concern about and that the Senate wasn't 
involved in and that a lot of law enforcement people weren't involved 
in.
  There have been reasons that people's passions are high, and there 
are reasons that are good ones because we care about this country. So I 
hope people will see that in perspective for why people are reacting 
the way they do.
  As for the Senator from Alabama, as I would call him for the purpose 
of these remarks, I am someone who has worked well with him. We have 
done bills together on adoption, and we have worked together on 
trafficking, and I am proud of the work I have done with him. We have 
also gone to the State of the Union together every single year, and I 
value his friendship.
  I came to the conclusion that I couldn't support him not for personal 
reasons, but because of some of the views he has expressed in the past 
and his record on the Violence Against Women Act, his views on 
immigration, and his views relating to voting rights.
  I think many of our colleagues, especially those who serve on the 
Judiciary Committee, feel the same way--that this wasn't personal, but 
we simply had a deep disagreement with some of his views on certain 
issues.
  Today I thought I would focus on the voting rights issue. I spoke 
earlier about the Violence Against Women Act, and I think that is a 
good place to start as we work together going forward. We have seen an 
attack on America's election system; we have had 17 intelligence 
agencies talking about the fact that a foreign country tried to 
influence our election. It is the core of our democracy. I know the 
Senator from Florida himself has said that this time it happened to one 
candidate, one party, and the next time it could be another party, 
another candidate. So this idea of voting--this idea of the freedom to 
vote--is the core of our democracy.
  One of the most important duties of the Justice Department--and that 
is the office for which the Attorney General would run--is safeguarding 
voters' access to the ballot box. This issue is important in my State. 
We had the highest voter turnout of any State in the country in this 
past election, and part of the reason we had such a good turnout is 
that we have good laws that allow for people to vote. It allows for 
same-day registration. We make it easy for people to vote; we don't 
make it hard. For me, that is one of the major duties of the Justice 
Department, and that is to enforce our voting rights.
  I will never forget when I traveled to Alabama in the last few years 
with one of the leaders, Congressman John Lewis, who was one of the 13 
original Freedom Riders. In 1964 he coordinated the efforts for the 
Mississippi Freedom Summit, recruiting college students from around the 
country to join the movement, to register African-American voters 
across the South. People from my State went, and people from every 
State in this Chamber went there for that March.
  On March 7, 1965, Congressman Lewis and 600 other peaceful protestors 
attempted to march from Selma to Birmingham to protest violence against 
civil rights workers. As they reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus 
Bridge, they saw a line of troopers blocking their way. At the end of 
the bridge, those peaceful marchers were attacked, just for calling for 
the right to vote. John Lewis's skull was fractured, and he still bears 
that scar to this day.
  The weekend that I went back there, 48 years after that bloody 
Sunday, was the weekend that the police chief of Montgomery actually 
handed Congressman Lewis a badge and publicly apologized for what 
happened to him that day, 48 years later. But as moving as that apology 
was, we still have a duty to make sure that those sacrifices were not 
in vain. We also need to make it easier for people to actually vote, 
and that is a promise still unmet in America over 50 years later, 
whether it is lines at voting booths or whether it is laws in place 
that make it harder to vote.
  I just look at this differently, having come from a high voter 
turnout State, a State where we have same-day registration, and when we 
look at the other high voter States that have that same-day 
registration station--Iowa, the Presiding Officer's State is one of 
them; that is not really a Democratic State, yet they have a high voter 
turnout and people participate and feel a part of that process. New 
Hampshire, Vermont, these States are truly split, but what we want to 
see is that kind of participation.
  A couple of months after I was in Selma, the Supreme Court handed 
down its decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. In this 
decision, the Justices found that a formula in section 4 of the Voting 
Rights Act was unconstitutional. This formula was used to decide which 
States and localities needed to have Federal approval for any changes 
made to their voting rights laws, endangering the progress made over 
the past 50 years.
  According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, following 
the Shelby County decision, 14 States put new voting restrictions in 
place that impacted the 2016 Presidential election. Three other States 
also passed restrictive voting measures, but those laws were blocked by 
the courts. So the harm is very real and very serious, and we can't sit 
by and just let this happen.
  Specifically, we need a Department of Justice that will vigorously 
enforce the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act as well as the 
National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. 
Currently, a majority of the States are not complying with the National 
Voter Registration Act, leaving voting rolls outdated and preventing 
eligible voters from casting their ballots. Without a Department of 
Justice that makes the enforcement of these laws a priority, the rights 
of voters will continue to be infringed.
  Congress also needs to take action through legislation to make right 
what came out of that Supreme Court decision. Effectively throwing out 
the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act just doesn't make 
sense. As Justice Ginsberg put so well in her dissent, ``Ending 
preclearance now is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm 
because you are not getting wet.''
  Those marchers in Selma sacrificed too much for us not to fight back. 
That is why I cosponsored legislation last Congress that would amend 
the Voting Rights Act.

[[Page 2048]]

  I am under no illusion that amending the Voting Rights Act in 
Congress will be easy. It won't be. We have seen some bipartisan 
support. In fact, Congressman Sensenbrenner, from my neighboring State 
of Wisconsin, who sponsored the reauthorization in 2006, called for 
Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act. As he put it, ``the Voting 
Rights Act is vital to America's commitment to never again permit 
racial prejudices in the electoral process.''
  Another issue I want to focus on this evening that I raised in 
Senator Sessions' hearing is the fundamental importance of freedom of 
the press. My dad was a newspaper reporter, and up until a few years 
ago, he was still writing a blog. So I am especially sensitive to, and 
concerned about, maintaining the press's role as a watchdog.
  On a larger note, the role of journalists is critical to our Nation's 
democracy. That is why our Founders enshrined freedom of the press in 
the First Amendment. When we look at what we are seeing in the last few 
years in our country, what concerns me is this assault on democracy. We 
have voting rights issues with people unable to vote, with lines, with 
restrictive voting laws passed as opposed to finding ways to allow more 
people to vote. We have outside money in politics. Recently, we have 
some of the things being said about judges, and now we have some 
assault on this notion of the freedom of the press.
  Thomas Jefferson said that our first objective should be to leave 
open ``all avenues to truth,'' and the most effective way of doing that 
is through ``the freedom of press.'' This is still true today. Freedom 
of the press is the best avenue to truth. In fact, these values are 
more important now than ever, at a time when people are not exactly 
valuing the freedom of the press.
  I believe there are two distinct roles journalists will hold that 
Congress must preserve and strengthen in the coming years. The first is 
providing the people with information about their government. Sometimes 
this is as simple as covering the passage of a new law in a public 
forum. This work doesn't just lead to a better, informed public. It can 
also lead to important actions.
  Thanks to excellent reporting from across the country, Americans have 
been energized in the past. For instance, just a few weeks ago there 
was an attempt to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics over in the 
House. That came out, people were outraged, it was reported on, and 
they backed down.
  The second role we must preserve is journalists' responsibility to be 
fact-checkers. They research, they provide context, and, when they need 
to, they correct. We need newspapers and media to stand up for what is 
true and what is factual. Unlike what was recently said--not in this 
Chamber--the press cannot simply keep its mouth shut. The American 
people deserve the truth, and we are all relying on journalists to keep 
digging for it. I take this personally and seriously.
  In Senator Sessions' hearing I asked him whether he would follow the 
standards now in place at the Justice Department, which address when 
Federal prosecutors can subpoena journalists or their records and serve 
to protect reporters engaged in news-gathering activities. The previous 
two Attorneys General both pledged not to put reporters in jail if they 
were simply doing their job under the law.
  The Senator from Alabama did not make that commitment. When I asked 
him about this in his hearing, he said he had not yet studied those 
rules. He also did not make a commitment when I later asked him to do 
that on the record.
  The Senator from Alabama has also raised concerns in the past about 
protecting journalists from revealing their sources, including opposing 
the Free Flow of Information Act when it was considered by the 
Judiciary Committee in 2007, 2009, and 2013. So at this time, when our 
freedom of the press has been under attack at the highest levels of 
government, I believe it is critically important that our Justice 
Department continues to function as an independent voice that will 
protect the ability of journalists to do their job.
  Lastly, I want to take a moment to focus on the importance of the 
Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. As ranking member of 
the Antitrust Subcommittee, I am concerned about the state of 
competition in the marketplace. I wish to take a few minutes on this 
issue.
  I did ask Senator Sessions about this at his hearing, and he said he 
was committed to an independent division in the Justice Department and 
to continue that work without outside influence. I continue to believe 
that this issue will be important because of the massive amount of 
mergers we are seeing. The legal technicalities behind our antitrust 
laws will not be familiar to most Americans, but effective antitrust 
enforcement provides benefits we can all understand. When companies 
vigorously compete, they can offer consumers the lowest prices and the 
highest quality goods and services.
  Senator Sessions has stated that he will support the independence of 
that division, and I want to make clear how critical this is. It is 
absolutely essential that our next Attorney General enforces our 
antitrust laws fairly and vigorously, and that this person protects the 
integrity of the Antitrust Division's prosecutorial function from 
inappropriate influence. This is because vigilant antitrust enforcement 
means more money in the pockets of American consumers. The Attorney 
General can do this by identifying and preventing competition problems 
before they occur, like stopping a merger that would allow a few 
dominant players to raise prices, or, when a merger is allowed to move 
forward, putting conditions in place to protect competition.
  The next Attorney General will also be able to stop price-fixing 
cartels that hurt consumers by artificially inflating prices for goods 
such as auto parts, TVs, and tablet computers. Last year alone, the 
Justice Department obtained more than $1 billion in criminal antitrust 
fines. Anticompetitive practices have serious impacts on consumers; for 
example, pay-for-delay settlements that keep cheaper generic drugs from 
coming onto the markets. Estimates suggest that eliminating those 
sweetheart deals would generate over $2.9 billion in budget savings 
over 10 years and save American consumers billions on their 
prescription drug costs. That is why Senator Grassley and I worked on 
bipartisan legislation to give the Federal Trade Commission greater 
ability to block those anticompetitive agreements. Our Preserve Access 
to Affordable Generics Act would increase consumers' access to cost-
saving generic drugs.
  The bottom line is this. Antitrust enforcement is needed now more 
than ever. We are experiencing a wave of concentration across 
industries. Just last year, then-Assistant Attorney General for 
Antitrust Division Bill Baer, a lifelong antitrust practitioner, said 
his agency was reviewing deals with such antitrust concerns that they 
should never have made it out of the corporate boardroom.
  Not only will antitrust violations mean higher prices for Americans 
and less innovation, but the indirect effects are equally troubling. 
There is concern that undue concentration of economic power would 
exacerbate income inequality. There is also concern that concentration 
can hurt new businesses, stifling innovation. Why would you innovate if 
there is just one or two firms? Only effective antitrust enforcement by 
the Attorney General will prevent those harms, and effective 
enforcement can occur only if the Department of Justice makes 
enforcement decisions based on the merits of the individual case, 
rather than politics.
  Traditionally, the White House has not interfered with antitrust 
enforcement decisions, but recent reports indicate that the President 
has discussed pending mergers with CEOs during ongoing antitrust 
reviews. Some companies have also publicly reported their conversations 
with and their commitments to the President. In both Senator Sessions' 
hearing and in a follow up letter, I raised this issue with him. The 
Senator from Alabama said: ``It would be improper to consider any 
political, personal, or other non-legal

[[Page 2049]]

basis in reaching an enforcement decision.''
  That is the correct answer. I plan to rigorously protect the 
Antitrust Division's prosecutorial integrity to make sure it is 
principled and is done right. Antitrust and competition policy are not 
Republican or Democratic issues. A merger in the ag industry could have 
an effect on farmers in Iowa, as the Presiding Officer knows. These are 
consumer issues, and these issues could not be more important to all 
Americans. We can all agree that robust competition is essential to our 
free-market economy and critical to ensuring that consumers pay the 
best prices for what they need.
  I want to switch gears and conclude today by speaking about the 
President's Executive order regarding refugees, especially those from 
Muslim countries, which has caused so much chaos across our country 
over the past several weeks.
  While I know Senator Sessions was not involved in writing the 
Executive order, it is very important that going forward, obviously, 
the Attorney General and the Department of Justice's Office of Legal 
Counsel have a responsibility to review Presidential Executive orders 
and assure they are legal and done right.
  I sent a letter, with Senators Durbin, Whitehouse, Franken, Coons, 
and Blumenthal, and we asked Senator Sessions what he would have done 
if the President's Executive order came across his desk. As a former 
prosecutor, I have long advocated for thorough vetting and supported 
strong national security measures.
  I believe that the No. 1 priority should be making people safe. While 
working to strengthen biometrics and other security measures is a good 
goal, this is not the way our government should work--that an order 
should be put out there without properly vetting it and figuring out 
the effect it would have on a four-year-old girl who is in a refugee 
camp in Uganda. That happened.
  In my State, there was a mom who had two children, a Somali mother in 
a refugee camp. She got permission to come over to our State and to our 
country as a refugee. But she was pregnant, and when she had that baby, 
that baby did not have permission to come with her. So she had a 
Sophie's choice: Does she leave the baby in the refugee camp with 
friends and go to America with her two other daughters, or do all of 
them stay in the refugee camp in Uganda? She made a decision that she 
would go with her two older girls, that that would be the safest thing 
for them.
  For 4 years, she worked to get the child that was left behind in the 
refugee camp to America to be reunited with her sisters. The baby, who 
is now 4 years old, was to get on a plane on the Monday after the 
President's Executive order was issued. The 4-year-old could not get on 
that plane.
  Senator Franken and I got involved. We talked to General Kelly. He 
was more than generous with his time. They made an exception, and the 
4-year-old is now in Minnesota. But it should not take a Senator's 
intervention--as many of my colleagues know that have worked on these 
cases--to get a 4-year-old who is supposed to be reunited with their 
family, something that our government had worked on for 4 years and 
Lutheran Social Services in Minnesota had worked on for 4 years.
  If Senator Sessions is in fact confirmed as the next Attorney 
General, these are actual issues he is going to have to work on, and 
beyond that, we have the issue of how people in our country are afraid.
  We have 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota. We have the biggest Somali 
population in the country. A man who works for me started with my 
office 10 years ago and has been our outreach to the Somali community. 
He was just elected to the school board.
  We have Somalis elected to our city council. They are part of the 
fabric of life in our State. Congressman Emmer, who actually took the 
seat held by Michele Bachmann, is the cochair, along with Congressman 
Ellison, of the Somali caucus in the House of Representatives. We have 
not seen this as a Democratic issue or a Republican issue in our State. 
We have welcomed these refugees.
  We have the second biggest population of Hmong in the United States 
of America. We have the biggest Liberian population. We have one of the 
biggest populations of people from Burma. We have 17 Fortune 500 
companies in our State. When these refugees come over, they are legal 
workers, and they are a major part of our economy. So it is no surprise 
that during the last year, when we heard the kind of rhetoric that we 
have heard, people have been concerned--not just the refugees 
themselves, not just their friends and family, but a lot of people in 
our State. The churches have gotten involved--all kinds and every 
denomination in our State--to stand up for our Muslim population. Why? 
Because they have all heard the story. One of my most memorable stories 
was from a family whom I heard about when I was visiting with some of 
our Muslim population in Minneapolis. This was a story of two adults 
who actually had been in our State during 9/11. And during 9/11, George 
Bush stood up and he said: This isn't about a religion. This is about 
evil people who did evil things, but it is not to indict a religion.
  His U.S. attorney at the time, the Republican U.S. attorney, went 
around with me--the elected prosecutor for the biggest county in our 
State--and we met with the Muslim population and assured them they were 
safe and told them to report hate crimes. The family, these two adults, 
they were there then. Nothing bad happened to them. No one called them 
a name.
  Fast-forward to this summer. They are at a restaurant with their two 
little children. They are just sitting there having dinner.
  A guy walks by and says: You four go home. You go home to where you 
came from.
  The little girl looked up at her mom, and she said: Mom, I don't want 
to go home and eat tonight. You said we could eat out tonight.
  The words of an innocent child. She didn't even know what that man 
was talking about because she only knows one home. That home is our 
State, and that home is the United States of America.
  If Senator Sessions is confirmed for this position, he is going to 
have an obligation to that little girl who was in that restaurant and 
to all of the people in our country because this is the Justice 
Department of the United States of America.
  As a former prosecutor, I know a big part of that job is prosecuting 
cases and doing all we can to keep America safe from evildoers, but it 
is also about keeping our Constitution and our rights safe.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, the Attorney General of the United 
States holds a vital and also somewhat unique position in the Federal 
Government. The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with 
significant responsibilities that must be executed independently, 
sometimes even in defiance of the White House's wishes and interests.
  The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with enforcing 
our laws fairly, justly, and evenhandedly, as well as with protecting 
the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans of all 
persuasions, of all backgrounds. The Attorney General of the United 
States does not work for the President so much as for the people and 
does not serve the administration so much as the law.
  I have served in the U.S. Department of Justice. I have felt its 
esprit de corps, its pride. That pride is founded on a firm sense of 
the Department's willingness to stand on what is right, even against 
the wishes of the White House. One fine example of this was Attorney 
General Ashcroft challenging and refusing to accede to the wishes of 
the White House on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of 
Americans. The Department of Justice is well aware of the importance of 
its independence.
  A successful Attorney General must be stalwart in protecting the 
Department from political meddling by the

[[Page 2050]]

administration or by Congress. We need only look back to Attorney 
General Gonzales's resignation to recall how badly things turn out when 
an Attorney General yields to political pressure.
  An Attorney General also makes policy decisions about where and how 
to direct the Department's $27 billion budget and when and how to 
advise Congress to recommend new laws and modify existing policies. 
These are policy choices an Attorney General makes. It is no answer to 
questions about those policy choices to say: I will follow the law. 
That doesn't apply in this arena of funding decisions and legislative 
recommendations that are policy choices not dictated by law. Those 
policy choices can have a profound effect on individuals, on 
communities, and on the fabric of our Nations.
  Americans should be able to trust that their Attorney General will 
not only enforce the laws with integrity and impartiality but stand up 
for Americans of all stripes and fight on behalf of their rights. That 
is the prism through which I evaluate Senator Sessions' nomination.
  I have known Senator Sessions for a decade and have enjoyed working 
with him on a number of pieces of legislation. However, the standard by 
which I evaluate an Attorney General nominee is whether Rhode Islanders 
will trust that in the tough clinches, he will always be independent 
and always fair.
  I have reviewed Senator Sessions' career as an attorney and as a 
Senator, as well as his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I 
have reflected on my own duties and experience as my State's attorney 
general and as the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island. I have also served as 
an attorney in our State attorney general's office.
  By the way, the attorney general in Rhode Island has full prosecutive 
authority. Many States have a division in which the attorney general 
has a narrow ambit of authority and district attorneys do the bulk of 
the criminal prosecution--not so in Rhode Island.
  I have also had the occasion to listen closely to very strong and 
honest, serious concerns from Rhode Islanders who have made it plain to 
me that they fear what Senator Sessions would do as head of the Justice 
Department. For every constituent of mine who has expressed support of 
his nomination, 15 have expressed opposition.
  Senator Sessions has fought against fixing our immigration system, 
opposing as the leading opponent of bipartisan legislation which, had 
it passed, would have spared us much of the current debate over walls 
     and immigration.
  Senator Sessions fought against our bipartisan criminal justice and 
sentencing reform bill.
  Senator Sessions opposed reauthorizing the Violence Against Women 
Act--a bill which is vitally important to the Rhode Island Department 
of Attorney General and to the anti-domestic violence groups around 
Rhode Island.
  Senator Sessions' record on support of gay and lesbian Americans has 
alarmed many Rhode Islanders. Public statements and confirmation 
testimony by Senator Sessions suggest that he brings a religious 
preference to the Department and that what he calls secular attorneys 
would be, to him, suspect compared to Christian attorneys. That 
distinction between a secular attorney and a religious attorney is one 
that runs counter to very solid principles upon which my State was 
founded. Roger Williams brought to us freedom of conscience.
  Senator Sessions has called Breitbart News a bright spot. I must 
disagree. Breitbart News is not, to me, a bright spot. Breitbart has 
published baseless and inflammatory articles with titles like ``Birth 
Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.''
  In fairness, I should disclose that Senator Sessions' nomination 
carries an additional burden with me as the nominee of this President 
and this White House. The need for an independent Attorney General has 
rarely, if ever, been greater.
  On the campaign trail, the American people witnessed Donald Trump 
glorify sexual misconduct, mock a disabled reporter, and make 
disparaging remarks about immigrants and minorities. We all witnessed 
chants at Trump rallies of ``lock her up.'' At his confirmation 
hearings, Senator Sessions excused these as ``humorously done.'' In 
mass rallies that also featured people getting beaten and the press 
caged and vilified, this didn't seem very humorous to many Americans. I 
think Americans know that the good guys in the movie are not the ones 
in the mob; the good guy is the lawman who stands on the jailhouse 
porch and sends the mob home. To me, that ``lock her up'' chant was un-
American. I believe that across the country it made honest prosecutors' 
stomachs turn.
  Not surprisingly, many Americans are fearful of what the Trump 
administration will mean for them, for their families, and for their 
country.
  The problems with this President did not end with the campaign. 
President Trump and his family have brought more conflicts of interest 
to the White House than all other modern Presidents and families 
combined. The proposed Trump domestic Cabinet is an unprecedented swamp 
of conflicts of interest, failures of disclosure and divestment, and 
dark money secrets. We have not even been permitted, in the course of 
our nomination advice-and-consent process, to explore the full depth of 
that unprecedented swamp because the dark money operations of nominees 
have been kept from us. In one case, thousands of emails are still 
covered up. The Trump White House traffics in alternative facts, 
operates vindictively, and is a haven for special interest influence. 
None of this is good. All of this suggests that there will be more or 
less constant occasion for investigation and even prosecution of this 
administration.
  Independence is at a premium. Nothing could have made this more clear 
than the first disagreement between the Trump White House and the 
Department of Justice, whose outcome was that the Acting Attorney 
General--a woman with 30 years' experience in the Department, a career 
prosecutor, former assistant U.S. attorney, former U.S. attorney, and 
someone recognized for her leadership throughout the Department--was 
summarily fired.
  This is also not a good sign. In recent history, Attorneys General 
Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell were politically close to their 
Presidents, and the Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell tenures did not end 
well.
  Attorney General Mitchell worked for President Nixon. They met when 
their New York law firms merged in the early 1970s, and they became law 
partners. John Mitchell was the campaign manager for Nixon's 1968 
Presidential campaign. There were signs that things weren't quite right 
because when Nixon nominated Mitchell to be his Attorney General, he 
appealed directly to FBI Director Hoover not to conduct the usual 
background check. Mitchell ultimately resigned as Attorney General in 
order to run President Nixon's reelection campaign. So the political 
link between Mitchell and Nixon was very close, and sure enough, 
scandal ensued. Attorney General Mitchell turned out to be a central 
figure of the Watergate scandal. As the chairman of the reelection 
committee, the famous CREEP, Mitchell was responsible for appointing G. 
Gordon Liddy and approving the dirty tricks program while still 
Attorney General.
  That dirty tricks program ultimately included breaking into national 
Democratic headquarters in the Watergate. The upshot of this was that 
Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and three 
counts of perjury. He was convicted on all counts, and he served 19 
months in prison.
  Attorney General Edwin Meese was also very close to President Reagan. 
Meese joined the 1980 Reagan Presidential campaign as Chief of Staff. 
He ran the day-to-day campaign operations and was the senior issues 
adviser. After the election, Edwin Meese was given the job of leading 
the Reagan transition, and once in office, Reagan appointed Meese as 
Counselor to the President. According to press accounts at the time, 
Meese was known as someone who ``has known the President so long and so 
well, he has become almost an alter ego of Ronald Reagan.'' That was 
the political background between Meese and President Reagan.

[[Page 2051]]

  Again, it did not end well. Meese came under scrutiny for his role in 
the Iran-Contra scandal. The congressional committee that reported on 
the Iran-Contra scandal in November 1987 determined that Meese had 
failed to take appropriate steps to prevent members of the 
administration from destroying critical evidence. An independent 
counsel named Lawrence Walsh finished a report in 1993 that stated that 
Meese had made a false statement when he said Reagan had not known 
about the 1985 Iran-Contra deal. Iran-Contra was not the only 
controversy that plagued Attorney General Meese. A company called 
Wedtech Corporation was seeking Department of Defense contracts in the 
early 1980s. The company hired Meese's former law school classmate and 
his personal attorney, a lawyer named E. Robert Wallach, to lobby the 
Reagan administration on its behalf. Attorney General Meese helped 
Wedtech at Wallach's urging get a special hearing on a $32 million Army 
engine contract, although the Army considered the company unqualified. 
Well, the contract was awarded to Wedtech, and then one of Meese's top 
deputies went to work for Wedtech.
  The Federal criminal investigation that resulted led to the 
conviction of E. Robert Wallach, the former law school classmate and 
personal attorney of Meese, for whom he had set up the meetings with 
the government.
  Independent counsel James McKay investigated the Wedtech contract, 
including investigating allegations of misconduct by Meese. While Meese 
was never convicted, he resigned following the issuance of the 
independent counsel's 800-page report.
  Third is Attorney General Gonzales. Attorney General Gonzales was 
close to then-Governor Bush in Texas. He was his general counsel. When 
Governor Bush became President Bush, Gonzales came to Washington to 
serve as White House Counsel. He was appointed Attorney General in 
2005. During his tenure at the Department of Justice, there were 
multiple investigations, many of which played out before the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, involving the Warrantless Wiretapping Program, the 
U.S. attorney's scandal, and inquiries into the Department's management 
of the torture program legal opinions.
  Ultimately, Members of both Houses of Congress called for Attorney 
General Gonzales's resignation--or demanded that he be fired by the 
President--and Attorney General Gonzales resigned.
  There is a track record here of Attorneys General who are politically 
close to a President coming into harm's way and doing poorly in the 
Department. One particular office that is vulnerable to this kind of 
undue proximity, and failure of independence, is a body in the 
Department of Justice called the Office of Legal Counsel. Jack 
Goldsmith, a former head of the Office of Legal Counsel--and a 
Republican, by the way--testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee 
that ``more than any other institution inside the executive branch, OLC 
is supposed to provide detached, apolitical legal advice.'' And it has 
an honorable tradition of providing such advice to a remarkable degree, 
but under the Bush administration, the OLC departed from that 
tradition. It came up in a number of ways. The first was during our 
investigation into President Bush's Warrantless Wiretapping Program.
  When Office of Legal Counsel memos supporting the program came to 
light, I plowed through a fat stack of those classified opinions that 
were held in secret over at the White House and pressed to have some of 
the statements declassified. Here are some of the statements that were 
declassified found in those OLC opinions:

       An Executive order cannot limit a President. There is no 
     constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new 
     Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms 
     of a previous Executive order.

  So this means a President could issue an Executive order, have it 
published in the Federal Register, put it forward as the policy of the 
administration--a direction to all the attorneys in the 
administration--and then secretly depart from it without ever changing 
what the public is told about the policy. A theory like this allows the 
Federal Register, where these Executive orders are assembled, to become 
a screen of falsehood, behind which illegal programs can operate in 
violation of the very Executive order that purports to control the 
executive branch. That was just one.
  Another one I will quote: ``The President exercising his 
constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an 
action is a lawful exercise of the President's authority under Article 
II.''
  If that sounds a little bit like pulling yourself up by your own 
bootstraps, well, it sounds that way to me, too, and it runs contrary 
to a fairly basic constitutional principle announced in the famous case 
of Marbury v. Madison--which every law student knows--which says: ``It 
is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the 
law is.''
  A third example--and this is another quote from an OLC opinion: ``The 
Department of Justice is bound by the President's legal [opinions.]''
  Well, if that is true, what is the point of a President sending 
matters over to the Department of Justice for legal review? If the 
President did it, and it is therefore automatically legal, there would 
be no function to the Department of Justice accomplishing that legal 
review.
  So in this area of warrantless wiretapping, the Office of Legal 
Counsel within the Department of Justice came up with what seemed to be 
quite remarkable theories in the privacy and secrecy of that office, in 
those classified opinions that are really hard to justify in the broad 
light of day. That is why independence matters so much. Obviously, the 
White House wanted those opinions to say what they said, but in the 
clear light of day, they don't hold up.
  Let us move on from the warrantless wiretapping opinions of the Bush 
Department of Justice to the OLC opinions that the Bush administration 
used to authorize waterboarding of detainees. Again, I was one of the 
first Senators to review the OLC opinions, and when I read them, I will 
say I was quite surprised. I was surprised not just by what they said 
but by what they didn't say. One thing that was entirely omitted was 
the history of waterboarding. Waterboarding was used by the Spanish 
Inquisition, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, by the French-suppressing 
revolts in Algeria, by the Japanese in World War II, and by military 
dictatorships in Latin America. The technique, as we know, ordinarily 
involves strapping a captive in a reclining position, heels overhead, 
putting a cloth over his face, and pouring water over the cloth to 
create the impression of drowning. Senator John McCain, held captive 
for more than 5 years by the North Vietnamese, said this of 
waterboarding:

       It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.

  American prosecutors and American judges in military tribunals after 
World War II prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes for torture on 
the evidence of their waterboarding American prisoners of war. None of 
that history appeared in the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
  The other major thing the Office of Legal Counsel overlooked was a 
case involving a Texas sheriff who was prosecuted as a criminal for 
waterboarding prisoners in 1984. Let's start with the fact that this 
was a case that was brought by the Department of Justice. It was the 
U.S. attorney for that district who prosecuted the sheriff. The 
Department of Justice won the case at trial.
  The case went up on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth 
Circuit, the court one level below the U.S. Supreme Court. In its 
appellate decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit 
described the technique as ``water torture.''
  All a legal researcher had to do was to type the words ``water'' and 
``torture'' into the legal search engines Lexis or Westlaw, and this 
case would come up: United States v. Lee. You can find it at 744 F2d 
1124.
  Over and over in that published appellate opinion by the second 
highest level of court in the Federal judiciary, they described the 
technique as torture. Yet the Office of Legal Counsel

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never mentioned this case in their decision.
  Ordinarily, what a proper lawyer is supposed to do, if they find 
adverse precedent--i.e., decisions that appear to come down a different 
way than the argument the lawyer is making--is they report the decision 
to the court, and then they try to distinguish it, they try to convince 
the judge they are before why that case was either wrongly decided or 
does not apply on the facts of their case. But the Office of Legal 
Counsel did not offer any effort to distinguish the Fifth Circuit 
decision; it simply pretended it did not exist or it never found it. It 
is hard to know which is worse.
  At sentencing in the Lee case, the district judge admonished the 
former sheriff who had been found guilty of waterboarding: ``The 
operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.''
  Well, it is also pretty embarrassing when what is supposed to be the 
institution inside the executive branch that is supposed to provide 
detached, apolitical legal advice in an honorable tradition of 
providing such advice, to a remarkable degree, to quote Professor 
Goldsmith, misses a case so clearly on point.
  That was not the only OLC error. In addition to the warrantless 
wiretapping statements, in addition to the Office of Legal Counsel 
opinions on waterboarding, they undertook a review of the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act.
  In the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is something called an 
exclusivity provision. It says this: The Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act ``shall be the exclusive means by which electronic 
surveillance and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic 
communications may be conducted.'' Shall be the exclusive means. Seems 
pretty clear. But the Office of Legal Counsel said about that 
language--I quote them here: Unless Congress made a clear statement in 
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict 
Presidential authority to conduct wireless searches in the national 
security area, which it has not, then the statute must be construed to 
avoid such a reading--which it has not.
  Congress said that this shall be the exclusive means. If the OLC was 
not happy reading the language of the statute, they could go to a court 
where this language had already been construed. The decision was called 
United States v. Andonian, and the judge in that case ruled that this 
language, the exclusivity clause--I am quoting the court's decision--
``reveals that Congress intended to sew up the perceived loopholes 
through which the President had been able to avoid the warrant 
requirement.''
  The exclusivity clause makes it impossible for the President to opt 
out of the legislative scheme by retreating to his inherent executive 
sovereignty over foreign affairs. The exclusivity clause assures that 
the President cannot avoid Congress's limitations by resorting to 
inherent powers.
  In the face of that case law, the Office of Legal Counsel held that 
Congress had not said what it said and this was not exclusive language, 
even though a court had said so.
  The reason I share those three stories is because it really matters 
in important issues when the Department of Justice has the capability 
and the courage to stand up to the President. It really matters when 
they get it wrong. It really matters when they say things that simply 
are not correct or legally sound in order to support a warrantless 
wiretapping program. It really matters when they don't find the case on 
point to evaluate whether waterboarding is torture. It really matters 
when they go around a clear congressional statute which a judge has 
said closes the door to going around that statute by simply saying 
privately: Well, that door is not actually closed. It matters.
  I have insufficient confidence that as Attorney General, Senator 
Sessions will be able to stand up to the kind of pressure we can expect 
this White House to bring. We know that this White House operates 
vindictively and likes to push people around.
  We found out recently that Mr. Bannon went running over to see 
General Kelly to tell him to undo the green card waiver of the Muslim 
ban. Thankfully General Kelly refused and stuck by his duty. But this 
is the kind of White House we have, where they try to push people 
around to do the wrong thing.
  They are so contemptuous of authority outside their own that they are 
willing to attack a Federal judge who disagrees with them, calling him 
a ``so-called judge.'' They are willing to fire an Acting Attorney 
General who disagrees with them, firing her summarily and accusing her 
of betrayal. The pressure this White House can be expected to bring on 
the Department of Justice to conform itself not to the law but to the 
political demands of the President is going to be intense.
  Moreover, the conflicts of interest that crawl through this White 
House and that crawl over this swamp Cabinet offer every reasonable 
cause to believe that there will have to be investigations and 
prosecutions into this administration.
  That combination of a target-rich environment in this administration 
for investigation and prosecution with a vindictive White House that 
does not hesitate to try to bully officials into conformity calls for 
the highest degree of independence. I do not feel Senator Sessions 
makes that standard. He was too close to the President during the 
political race. He has not stood up against any of those excesses I 
have mentioned since then. It is with regret that I must say I will not 
be able to vote to confirm him.
  One of the reasons I became a lawyer was because of ``To Kill a 
Mocking Bird.'' As a kid, I just loved Atticus Finch. He is great in 
the movie. He is even better in the book. Some of the things that 
Atticus Finch says about the law and about human nature are so brave 
and so profound that from the first time I read that book, boy, I would 
love to have been Atticus Finch. I would love to have had the chance to 
stand in the breach when everyone was against you and stick up for 
doing something that was right. Gosh, that felt so great.
  Like the scene in many movies, the hero is not a part of the mob, not 
carrying a torch toward the jailhouse; the hero is the lonely lawman 
who sits on the porch and won't let the mob in. That is what I think we 
are going to need in our next Attorney General.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I will be speaking later tonight, perhaps 
about 2 o'clock, possibly on through 4 o'clock, but I wanted to take a 
few moments now and share some of the letter that was discussed earlier 
and share it in a fashion that is appropriate under our rules. I would 
like to thank very much my colleague from New Jersey for yielding a few 
minutes in order to do so.
  I think it is important for us to understand the context of what this 
letter was all about. This letter was a statement of Coretta Scott 
King, and it was dated Thursday, March 13, 1986. She noted: ``My 
longstanding commitment which I shared with my husband Martin''--of 
course that is Martin Luther King--``to protect and enhance the rights 
of black Americans, rights which include equal access to the Democratic 
process, tells me to testify today.'' Then in her letter she goes on to 
essentially present an essay about the essential role of voting rights 
in our country, and so I will continue to read in that regard. She 
says:

       The Voting Rights Act was and still is vitally important to 
     the future of democracy in the United States. I was 
     privileged to join Martin and many others during the Selma to 
     Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965. Martin was 
     particularly impressed by the determination to get the 
     franchise of blacks in Selma and neighboring Perry County. As 
     he wrote--

  Now she is quoting Martin Luther King--

       ``Certainly no community in the history of the negro 
     struggle has responded with the enthusiasm of Selma and her 
     neighboring town of Marion. Where Birmingham depended largely 
     upon students and unemployed adults to participate in 
     nonviolent protests of the denial of the franchise, Selma has 
     involved fully 10 percent of the negro

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     population in active demonstrations and at least half the 
     negro population of Marion was arrested on 1 day.''

  That was the end of the quote from her husband. She continued 
writing:

       Martin was referring, of course, to a group that included 
     the defendants recently prosecuted for assisting elderly and 
     illiterate blacks to exercise that franchise.
  Each time she refers to franchise, she is referring to this 
fundamental right to vote under our Constitution.
  And she continued:

       In fact, Martin anticipated from the depth of their 
     commitment 20 years ago, that a united political organization 
     would remain in Perry County long after the other marchers 
     had left. This organization, the Perry County Civic League, 
     started by Mr. Turner, Mr. Hogue, and others, as Martin 
     predicted, continued ``to direct the drive for votes and 
     other rights.''

  That is a quote from her husband. And then she continued. In this 
letter, she says:

       In the years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, Black 
     Americans in Marion, Selma, and elsewhere have made important 
     strides in their struggle to participate actively in the 
     electoral process. The number of Blacks registered to vote in 
     key Southern states has doubled [she said] since 1965. This 
     would not have been possible without the Voting Rights Act.

  She continues in her essay. She says:

       However, Blacks still fall far short of having equal 
     participation in the electoral process. Particularly in the 
     South, efforts continue to be made to deny Blacks access to 
     the polls, even where Blacks constitute the majority of the 
     voters. It has been a long up-hill struggle to keep alive the 
     vital legislation that protects the most fundamental right to 
     vote. A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the 
     enforcement of those laws, and thus, to the exercise of those 
     rights by Black people should not be elevated to the federal 
     bench.

  She continues in her letter to note:

       Twenty years ago, when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, 
     the fear of voting was real, as the broken bones and bloody 
     heads in Selma and Marion bore witness. As my husband wrote 
     at the time, ``it was not just a sick imagination that 
     conjured up the vision of a public official sworn to uphold 
     the law, who forced an inhuman march upon hundreds of Negro 
     children; who ordered the Rev. James Bevel to be chained to 
     his sickbed; who clubbed a Negro woman registrant, and who 
     callously inflicted repeated brutalities and indignities upon 
     nonviolent Negroes peacefully petitioning for their 
     constitutional right to vote.

  This is what Martin Luther King is referring to was the specific 
actions of sheriffs in the South who were representing the law. And 
then Coretta Scott King continued:

       Free exercise of voting rights is so fundamental to 
     American democracy that we cannot tolerate any form of 
     infringement of those rights. Of all the groups who have been 
     disenfranchised in our nation's history, none has struggled 
     longer or suffered more in the attempt to win the vote than 
     Black citizens. No group has had access to the ballot box 
     denied so persistently and intently.
       Over the past century, a broad array of schemes have been 
     used in attempts to block the Black vote. The range of 
     techniques developed with the purpose of repressing black 
     voting rights run the gamut from the straightforward 
     application of brutality against black citizens who tried to 
     vote, to such legalized frauds as ``grandfather clause'' 
     exclusions and rigged literacy tests.

  Now she proceeds to note that other techniques were used to 
intimidate Black voters and that included investigations into the 
absentee voting process, and this concerned her a great deal. And she 
notes that Whites have been using the absentee process to their 
advantage for years without incident. Then, when Blacks, realizing its 
strength, began to use it with success, criminal investigations were 
begun.
  Then she proceeds to address that there were occasions where 
individuals with legal authority chose to initiate cases specifically 
against African Americans while ignoring allegations of similar 
behavior by Whites, ``choosing instead to chill the exercise of the 
franchise by Blacks by his misguided investigation.''
  Let me continue later in the letter. She addresses her concern over 
the prosecution illegally withholding from the defense critical 
statements made by witnesses and that witnesses who did testify were 
pressured and intimidated into submitting the ``correct'' testimony. 
That is incorrect testimony.

       Many elderly Blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI 
     who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in 
     Mobile when they could have more easily testified at a grand 
     jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, 
     have announced they are now never going to vote again.

  She obviously is addressing issue after issue that affected the Black 
franchise, the franchise of African Americans, the ability to vote, and 
then she returns to her essay about how important this is.

       The exercise of the franchise is an essential means by 
     which our citizens ensure that those who are governing will 
     be responsible. My husband called it the number one civil 
     right. The denial of access to the ballot box ultimately 
     results in the denial of other fundamental rights. For, it is 
     only when the poor and disadvantaged are empowered that they 
     are able to participate actively in the solutions to their 
     own problems.

  Coretta Scott King continues:

       We still have a long way to go before we can say that 
     minorities no longer need to be concerned about 
     discrimination at the polls. Blacks, Hispanics, Native 
     Americans and Asian Americans are grossly underrepresented at 
     every level of government in America. If we are going to make 
     our timeless dream of justice through democracy a reality, we 
     must take every possible step to ensure that the spirit and 
     intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fifteenth 
     Amendment of the Constitution is honored.
       The federal courts hold a unique position in our 
     constitutional system, ensuring that minorities and other 
     citizens without political power have a forum in which to 
     vindicate their rights. Because of this unique role, it is 
     essential that the people selected to be federal judges 
     respect the basic tenets of our legal system: respect for 
     individual rights and a commitment to equal justice for all.
       The integrity of the Courts, and thus the rights they 
     protect, can only be maintained if citizens feel confident 
     that those selected as federal judges will be able to judge 
     with fairness others holding differing views.

  And she concludes her letter having examined a number of incidents in 
the historical record with this conclusion:

       I do not believe Jefferson Sessions possesses the requisite 
     judgment, competence, and sensitivity to the rights 
     guaranteed by the federal civil rights laws to qualify for 
     appointment to the federal district court.

  And that is the context of her letter; that voting rights matter a 
tremendous amount. I applaud the efforts of my colleague from 
Massachusetts to make this point and share this essay with the body of 
the Senate earlier this evening.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. MERKLEY. I yield.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I ask the Senator, through the 
Chair, if the letter from which he just read has a date?
  Mr. MERKLEY. Well, the answer is that it does have a date, and that 
is Thursday, March 13, 1986.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. 1986. And is the Senator aware of the occasion that 
brought this letter to the Senate?
  Mr. MERKLEY. I am.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. What was that occasion?
  Mr. MERKLEY. That occasion was a hearing before the Senate Judiciary 
Committee regarding the potential appointment of the individual to the 
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And this letter was made a matter of record in that 
hearing?
  Mr. MERKLEY. I do not know if it was made a matter of record.
  My impression initially was that she had read this letter at the 
hearing, but I am not sure if it was presented in person or as a 
document submitted to the committee.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. But clearly the content of this letter has been a 
matter known to the Senate and, depending on what the facts may show, 
may actually have been a record of the Senate for more than 30 years.
  Mr. MERKLEY. I believe that is probably correct.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So a Senator of the United States has been accused of 
violating a rule of the Senate for restating to the Senate a phrase 
that has been a matter of record in the Senate--if, indeed, that is the 
case--for 30 years.
  I yield the floor.

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