[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[August 9, 1999]
[Pages 1416-1420]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the American Bar Association in Atlanta, Georgia
August 9, 1999

    Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I want to say to all of 
you how very grateful I am to be here today at the American Bar 
Association, and especially under the leadership of my long-time friend 
Phil Anderson. I'm sure you could see 
there was a sort of an Arkansas tilt to a lot of the people who were 
introduced here today. [Laughter] Bruce Lindsey used to be one of his law partners. He even had his 
minister here. [Laughter]
    What you may not know is, the reason I'm here is that I got beat for 
Governor in 1980, and I was the youngest former Governor in the history 
of America. I had extremely limited career prospects, and Phil 
Anderson is the only guy in Arkansas that 
offered me a job. [Laughter] He's either a great prognosticator or a 
good gambler--[laughter]--and he's done a superb job.

[[Page 1417]]

    Let me say, seriously, how very much I appreciate the remarks that 
he made on the issue of gun safety at the 
outset of your convening here. It's a very important issue to the 
Attorney General and me and, of course, to 
Atlanta's wonderful mayor, Bill Campbell, and 
all of those who have struggled to make our streets safer. We're honored 
to be here. I think the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia and the secretary of state are 
here, and I thank them for being here.
    I want to join--I know that they've already been introduced, but 
Congressman John Lewis and Andy Young and Hank Aaron have been all 
very good friends to me and to Hillary over the years, and I'm 
profoundly honored by their presence here and their contributions to our 
country. I thank you all for being here.
    I want to thank all the people from the Cabinet: Secretary 
Slater, who is also a native son of our 
State; and the Attorney General for coming with 
us; and Mr. Podesta. But I want to say a 
special word of appreciation to Chuck Ruff; this, I think, is his last day as the White House 
Counsel. Actually, I think Friday was his last day, but I made him come 
with me today. [Laughter] He has demonstrated throughout his career, in 
many positions of public trust and in private practice, with 
extraordinary power and dignity, a ferocious ability to be a legal 
advocate and an even deeper devotion to the Constitution and laws of the 
United States. He is a magnificent human being, and the United States 
and his President will always be in his debt. Thank you, Mr. Ruff.
    Several of you were at the White House last month when we celebrated 
the 35th anniversary of President Kennedy's historic call to the legal 
community to advance the cause of civil rights. We talked then about the 
role our lawyers must play in building one America, renewing our 
commitment to combat discrimination, to revitalize our poorest 
communities, to encourage diversity in the legal profession and all its 
institutions, and to continue the legal community's commitment to pro 
bono work.
    This has been very important to me and to my family. A lot of you 
know that Hillary was formerly the 
chair of the ABA's committee on women in the profession and the chair of 
the Legal Services Corporation. We have lived with these issues for 
almost 30 years now. And I want to thank the ABA for working with our 
initiative for one America, headed by Ben Johnson in the White House, who is also here today, to launch a 
national drive to increase diversity in all sectors of the legal 
profession.
    I also want to thank your incoming president, William Paul, for his efforts to raise $1 million for aid for 
the ABA scholarship for minority students and for his very generous 
contribution to kick off the drive.
    I know that you are also committed to ensuring that our legal 
profession serves all Americans equally. I've asked Congress to fund my 
request for the Legal Services Corporation. Phil has already given it a good plug, and I can hardly compete 
with birthday cake. [Laughter] But we need your help. I've had to fight 
for the Legal Services Corporation every year since 1995, and I am happy 
to fight for it again, but I'll have a lot more success if they know 
that all of you from all the States, from both political parties, 
understand the importance of its preservation and its vital role.
    I also want to ask you to work with us to make our Federal 
sentencing guidelines fairer, to correct some of the discrepancies in 
sentencing for similar crimes. This is an issue that most people in 
public life are reluctant to discuss, because there is always another 
election coming up and no one wants to be judged soft on crime and 
because there are always exceptions which can be made to seem the rule.
    But I think every person in our criminal justice system, from the 
members of the Supreme Court to the Attorney General, right through the 
ranks, knows that there are certain inequities in these sentencing 
guidelines that cannot be countenanced when measured against the 
standards of justice, fairness, or our common interest in having the 
safest possible society. So I ask you to help. You cannot expect the 
elected officials to deal with this alone, but if you give them the 
support they need and the evidence they need and the arguments they 
need, we may be able to continue to improve this system.
    We have the lowest crime rate in this country in 26 years. We should 
now be focusing on making this the safest big country in the entire 
world. But we can only do it if we are not only making this country 
safer but fairer and more decent and more just. And like most everybody 
else that's had experience with this, I am absolutely convinced we can 
continue to remove the inequities from the sentencing guidelines without 
seeing the crime rate go up or increasing the number of innocent 
victims. But we need your help to do it.

[[Page 1418]]

    Finally, I'd like to ask for your support in another goal that is 
critical to building one America, and that is establishing a judiciary 
that is both strong and vibrant, that is both fair and diverse. Having a 
judiciary that reflects both excellence and diversity is critical to 
equal justice under the law, to safe streets broadly supported by the 
public, and to building one America. It is also a very important part of 
America setting an example for the rest of the world.
    Your president mentioned that you have representatives here from 
over 50 countries. And when he said it, it put me to thinking that I 
have spent an inordinate amount of the time that you gave me to be 
President in the last 6\1/2\ years worrying about wars and rumors of 
wars and conflicts that spread from Northern Ireland to the Middle East 
to the Balkans to Africa to Kashmir. All across the world, on every 
continent, people continue to fight each other. And the roots of their 
fighting are their racial, their ethnic, and their religious 
differences; people who can't help looking at other people who are 
different from them and seeing someone who is alien; people who do not 
see past the color or the faith to the common humanity, which is far 
more important than that which divides us.
    If the United States is going to be a force for good in the 21st 
century, we must continue to be better here at home. And we cannot 
expect everyone else in our society to be better unless those of us in 
the Government set a good example. Anybody who has ever been in a 
courtroom, either as an advocate or a client, knows that if you are in 
court, the judge is the most important person in the world. And to have 
a judiciary that reflects the diversity of America, as well as its 
commitment to equal justice under law and to professional excellence, is 
a profoundly important national goal.
    If I might, I'd like to take just a moment to pay tribute to a man 
whose life and career were a testament to these objectives, Judge Frank 
Johnson. Few Americans struck so many 
blows for equal justice. I was honored to award him the Presidential 
Medal of Freedom in 1995. We all miss him, but our Nation is better 
because he lived and served.
    When I leave you tonight, I go to honor with another Presidential 
Medal of Freedom, another American whose commitment to equal justice and 
to world peace are unequal, President Jimmy Carter. Among President Carter's many and varied contributions 
to our national life is his record of support for civil rights and for 
diversity and excellence on the Federal bench. I have worked hard to 
build on that record.
    I'm proud that the judges I have appointed during my tenure are the 
most diverse group in American history. Nearly half are women and 
minorities; more than half the current judicial nominees are. But they 
have shattered the destructive myth that diversity and quality do not go 
hand in hand. In fact, thanks to your committee, my appointees have 
garnered the highest percentages of top ABA ratings of any President in 
nearly 40 years.
    It is against this backdrop that I tell you about two historic 
nominations to the Federal bench. It's difficult to believe that in 
1999, despite the fact that more African-Americans live in the fourth 
circuit than any other appellate jurisdiction, the U.S. Court of Appeals 
for the Fourth Circuit has never had an African-American judge. On 
Thursday, we took steps to remedy that, when I nominated Judge James 
Andrew Wynn, a highly respected judge on 
the North Carolina Court of Appeals, to serve as the first African-
American judge ever on the fourth circuit.
    I was also proud to announce another first--in some ways, given the 
history of the last 30 years, even more hard to believe--when I 
nominated Judge Ann Williams, a Federal trial 
judge in Chicago, known throughout the bar for her talent and 
dedication, to become the first African-American judge ever to serve on 
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
    Now, both Judge Wynn and Judge 
Williams will make outstanding contributions to 
our courts and to our country. But first, they must be confirmed. And 
recent experience shows this can be an unnecessarily long and grueling 
process that I believe serves neither the judiciary nor our Nation.
    Judge Johnson once said, the hallmark of any civilized society lies 
precisely in its ability to do justice. But we cannot expect our society 
to do justice without enough judges to handle the rising number of cases 
in our courts. Despite the high qualifications of my nominees, there is 
a mounting vacancy crisis in the courts.
    During the first 3 years of our administration, we made tremendous 
progress in reducing the number of judicial vacancies. But the progress 
came to a screeching halt in 1996, a presidential election year, when 
judges became grist for the

[[Page 1419]]

mill of partisan politics. In that year, only 17 judges were confirmed, 
and for the very first time in 40 years, not a single circuit court 
judge was confirmed by the Senate.
    The result was a crisis so severe that last year, Supreme Court 
Chief Justice Rehnquist warned that 
vacancies in our court could actually undermine our legal system's 
ability to fairly administer justice. In response to this alarm, the 
Senate worked with us last year, and under the leadership of Senator 
Orrin Hatch, in a bipartisan fashion, we were 
able to fill 65 vacancies in our Federal courts. But no sooner had we 
begun to remedy the rising emergency then, once again, the politics of 
the Senate began to stop the confirmation process in its track.
    Consider: this year alone I have nominated 61 judicial candidates; 
16 of the 61 are due to fill vacancies in jurisdiction among the 21 that 
have been declared judicial emergencies because of the caseload backlog 
and the length of vacancy. I will nominate candidates for the other five 
positions this fall, when the Senate comes back.
    Now, during this period in which I have nominated 61 candidates, the 
Senate has confirmed only 11, and only 13 more have been reported out of 
committee; 37 are still stuck there. There are only 16 vacancies on the 
Federal bench for which I have made no nominations, and I believe that 
is an historic low, because of the time it takes to do the FBI checks, 
the background checks, and run all the traps that modern life seems to 
require. Nine of the 13 candidates currently voted out of committee, but 
not voted on in the Senate, are women or minorities.
    This year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of President Truman's 
appointment of the first African-American to the Court of Appeals, the 
highly respected William H. Hasty; and the 65th anniversary of President 
Roosevelt's appointment of Florence Allen to be the first woman to serve 
on an appellate court. We should commemorate these occasions by building 
on them with qualified people. We should honor the tradition of service. 
We should not--not; I repeat, not--have another replay of 1996. The 
worst effects of the slowdown are making themselves felt across our 
country. Exploding civil and criminal court dockets affect the lives of 
tens of thousands of Americans. They strain our justice system to the 
breaking point.
    For civil litigants, we know that justice delayed can be justice 
denied. For criminal cases, we clearly need the most rapid possible 
action. The Attorney General was talking to me on 
the way in about how we had succeeded in getting the crime rate down. 
But we had to have enough judges on the bench to take time in each of 
these cases to make the right kind of sentencing decisions if we want 
the criminal justice system to continue to work in a way that is both 
fair and effective.
    We simply cannot afford to allow political considerations to keep 
our courts vacant and to keep justice waiting. All of you know, I think, 
that I have worked very hard to avoid having major ideological fights of 
the kind we saw in previous years over judicial nominees. I have sought 
to find good people who believe in the Constitution and the law and 
equal justice, who reflected the diversity of America, but who were 
completely qualified, so that I could bring them to the Senate and get 
them through in an expeditious way.
    So, again, I say, I'm going to go back after the August recess and 
try to do this. I'm also going to ask the Senate to do the right thing 
and confirm Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Bill Lann 
Lee, who also deserves to be confirmed.
    I want to thank you for using the power of your voice to encourage 
the Senate to address the mounting crisis in our courts by moving 
forward on the nominees as soon as possible. I want to thank the ABA's 
standing committee on Federal judiciary, especially the chairs, for the 
excellent job you've done evaluating my nominees for 6\1/2\ years.
    I want to ask you, again, to reaffirm your conviction on this issue 
and think about it in the larger context of both our eternal quest for 
individual justice and our eternal quest to build one America and in 
terms of our obligations around the world. If we want to go from 
Northern Ireland to the Middle East to Kosovo and Bosnia to Central 
Africa and ask people to lay down their hatreds, to no longer fear the 
other, to see diversity as a source of interest and joy that makes life 
more exciting but in no way undermines our common humanity, if we want 
to be a force for good around the world, we must do good at home and 
always become better.
    The ABA has been a force for that, and for that I am profoundly 
grateful.
    Thank you very much.

[[Page 1420]]

Note: The President spoke at 5:10 p.m. in the Sydney J. Marcus 
Auditorium at the Georgia World Congress Center. In his remarks, he 
referred to Philip S. Anderson, outgoing president, and William G. Paul, 
president-elect, American Bar Association; Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor and 
Secretary of State Cathy Cox of Georgia; former United Nations 
Ambassador Andrew Young; and member of the Baseball Hall of Fame Hank 
Aaron.