[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 24, 2000]
[Pages 2308-2312]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a People for the American Way Reception
October 24, 2000

    Thank you very much, Ralph. I want to 
thank you and your predecessor, Carole Shields, and the other board members of the People for the 
American Way. I thank Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston for joining us tonight. Where are you, 
Sheila? She's here somewhere--right there. Thank you. And I want to 
thank Mary Frances Berry. You know, we go 
back to the Carter administration together. We've been friends for way 
over 20 years, and now she's the Chair of our U.S. Commission on Civil 
Rights. She's done a magnificent job. [Applause] Thank you.
    I smiled when I walked in and put my arm around her. I said, ``Mary Frances, that gray hair looks a lot 
better on you than it does on me.'' And we concluded that we had both 
earned every one of ours in the last 8 years, and we're proud to have 
them. So thank you, Mary Frances Berry. Thank you.
    I want to thank you for hosting this event. I thank all of you for 
participating, because one of the great questions the American people 
will answer in this election is the future of the Supreme Court, the 
future of the Federal courts generally, and what the shape of American 
life will be when it comes to the individual rights of American 
citizens, and potentially as important, the power of the United States 
Congress and the Federal Government to protect the American people from 
all manner of things, in the face of a determined effort by what is 
already on occasion a majority in the Supreme Court to limit the ability 
of the Congress to do it.

[[Page 2309]]

    On a daily basis, Federal judges make decisions that affect our 
everyday lives. Of course, they can decide at the Supreme Court level 
whether women continue to have the right to choose or if their 
fundamental rights to privacy will be eliminated; whether the Government 
can keep a safe environment for our children; whether we can keep guns 
out of schools; whether we can pass a law to protect women from 
violence; whether we can ban hate crimes; and whether we can expect the 
States to cooperate with the Federal Government and do their part if the 
Congress finds the national interest, or whether we will have a new form 
of ultra-conservative judicial activism that rejects the Government's 
rights or authority to protect the rights of our citizens and the 
interests of our citizens.
    For 8 years now, I have worked to ensure that our courts at all 
levels are filled with judges who are qualified, fair, reflect our 
Nation's diversity, and uphold and enforce our laws. Since 1993, I've 
had the honor to appoint more women and minorities to the Federal bench 
than any previous President, almost half of my judicial appointees. But 
I'm also gratified to know that they have garnered the highest 
percentages of top ABA ratings of any group of Presidential appointees 
in nearly 40 years, which shatters the myth that you can't have 
diversity and excellence at the same time.
    In spite of the fact that study after study after study have shown 
how qualified these people are, and I might add, how relatively 
nonideological and mainstream, a number of my appointees, especially in 
election years, both in 1996 and this year--although in this case, some 
of these go back the last 3 or 4 years--have been denied a place on the 
bench and in many cases even denied a hearing for partisan political 
reasons, even though it's clear that they're qualified. There are more 
than 40 pending judicial nominees currently. More than half of them are 
women and minorities. A study not very long ago showed that the women 
and minorities I appointed had to wait a whole lot longer for a hearing 
than guys that looked like me, and that they were much more likely to be 
denied.
    For example, even though the fourth circuit in our country, in 
southeastern United States, has the largest percentage of African-
Americans of any Circuit in the United States, no African-American has 
ever served on it. And there have been plenty of qualified lawyers in 
the fourth circuit who happen to be African-American. Roger 
Gregory would be the first African-
American. He's not been given a hearing.
    In the fifth circuit, which has, next to the ninth circuit, the 
largest number of Hispanics, Enrique Moreno--
graduated with great distinction from Harvard and is a native of El 
Paso, and the judges in west Texas said he was one of the three best 
lawyers in west Texas--has been deemed unqualified for the fifth circuit 
by the Republican Senators. And I might say, the response from the other 
Republican officials in Texas has been deafening silence.
    The longest waiting appellate nominee is Helene White of Michigan, who has been waiting for 3 years now. 
They include Kathleen McCree Lewis, 
daughter of the civil rights lion Wade McCree. She'd be the first 
African-American woman to serve on the sixth circuit. The people who 
can't get a vote include Bonnie Campbell, 
former attorney general of Iowa, who led our administration's efforts to 
pass the Violence Against Women Act.
    Time and again I have asked the Senate leadership just to give these 
folks a vote. But they did it once, when they rejected Ronnie 
White, the first African-American State 
supreme court justice in the history of Missouri, who was turned down 
for a Federal judgeship, though he was superbly qualified, on grossly 
political grounds. And the reaction of the public in Missouri and 
throughout the United States was predictable and quite honorable. And so 
the next strategy was that ``People don't like it very much when we vote 
these folks down, so we'll just let them die in silence. We'll just 
never have hearings.''
    I've had, as you might imagine, a lot more success in appointing 
Federal trial judges, but the Republican majority has been quite 
sensitive to the appellate courts because they know they make a lot of 
policy, just like the Supreme Court. And when they had the White House 
the last time, they appointed a lot of very young people to those 
appellate courts, in the hope that by the time they got it the next 
time, whatever they couldn't pass through Congress and whatever the 
American people wouldn't put up with, they could just do it through the 
courts, with people who had life tenure.
    Now, we're just a vote or two away from reversing Roe v. Wade in the 
United States Supreme Court, and I think it's inevitable that

[[Page 2310]]

the next President will have two appointments to the Supreme Court; 
could be more.
    Beyond that, as I intimated in my opening remarks, there has already 
been a majority in this Court for restricting the ability of Congress, 
even a bipartisan majority in Congress, to get the States to help 
implement public interest legislation that protects people. The Supreme 
Court threw out part of the Brady bill because it required the States to 
help do things. It struck down part of the Violence Against Women Act, 
and other laws. I'm sure that people who are going to be part of this 
forum will talk more about this, and I don't need to go through this 
whole litany of cases.
    But I can tell you that Justice Scalia 
and Justice Thomas, occasionally with three 
others voting with them, have a view that is quite different than the 
view that has prevailed in the country for the last 40 years about what 
Congress should be able to do to advance the cause of civil rights and 
the environment and public health. Now, I have no doubt this view is 
honestly held, and I have no personal criticism of them, but they do 
have a lifetime appointment and unlimited abilities, except only by the 
cases that come before them, to advance this view. And if they get one 
or two more allies and their view prevails, we'll have a philosophy of 
what the role of the National Government in our country's life is that 
will be coming out of the Supreme Court that will have as its only 
modern parallel what prevailed in the 1930's, until Franklin Roosevelt 
tried to pack the Court with the help of his majority leader from my 
home State, Joe T. Robinson. And the public hated it, and there was a 
terrible reaction, but afterward the Supreme Court began to uphold the 
New Deal legislation.
    And so we all want to pretend that there's no politics in this, but 
there is certainly philosophy in this. There is philosophy in the 
appointments of Supreme Court Justices and appellate court justices. And 
therefore, the Presidency is important, but the Senate races are 
important as well, because they have to confirm these folks.
    And I don't doubt for a moment that the main problems that the 
present majority in the United States Senate has with my nominees is 
probably not primarily race or gender; they just know they're not going 
to be as rightwing as they think they ought to be. And they can't 
credibly claim that they would be too liberal--whatever that is--but 
they know that if they can just keep these folks from getting a hearing, 
over and over and over again, and then if they get lucky and have the 
Senate and the White House, they'll be able to move the judiciary way to 
the right and reinforce and accelerate the pace of decisions restricting 
not only some individual rights under the judicially defined 
constitutional right to privacy but also the ability of the National 
Government to protect certain vital interests.
    That's what was inherent in the Brady bill, the Violence Against 
Women Act, and any number of these other cases. And I said I hope the 
people that come behind me will actually go through in greater detail 
these cases, because I think a lot of Americans have a general idea that 
the right to choose may be at stake in this election in the appointments 
to the Supreme Court, but what--I think virtually no Americans, outside 
those who follow the day-to-day decisions of the Supreme Court, 
understand just how many of our other rights are at stake by virtue of 
the possibility of different Court appointments.
    So I come here just to sort of give you good cheer and say how 
you're doing a good thing--[laughter]--and remind you of something. The 
American people have normally gotten it right. That's why we're all 
around here after 224 years. Sometimes it takes an agonizingly long 
period of time, but the story of the United States of America is pretty 
much an illustration A of Martin Luther King's eloquent statement that 
the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. So I urge you 
to see your presence here as benders. You're the people who are supposed 
to make sure the arc keeps bending toward justice.
    Our country is a different place than it was 8 years ago. We're 
remarkably more diverse, as well as more prosperous. We're learning to 
live together and work together and accept each other in ways that we 
never did before. You've now got more than two-thirds of the country and 
heavy majorities of people in both political parties for a hate crimes 
bill that protects gay Americans as well as racial minorities and 
disabled people. It's a big deal. That's a big deal. You've got a 
majority in the country and a majority of people in both parties for an 
``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' that covers gay Americans as well 
as people of all races. But

[[Page 2311]]

the anchors of the Republican Party in the Congress are to the right of 
that, and they see this election as their chance.
    Now, while it's true that nobody can predict with any 100 percent 
precision how his or her appointees will vote--thank goodness, President 
Eisenhower didn't really know about Earl Warren and Bill Brennan--
[laughter]--we've got a lot better feel for it today than they did 40 
years ago and a lot better idea of what the issues are going to be. And 
I say this with all respect: We should all assume that the people 
running for President and the people running for the Senate and all 
these other races, that they actually believe what they say, and 
therefore, if they are elected, we should assume that they will act on 
their beliefs.
    As I have said repeatedly, the American people ought to view this 
election as a celebration: how to keep our economy going; how to extend 
it to people in places left behind; how to keep the environment 
improving and the schools improving and more people getting health 
insurance and the welfare rolls and the crime rates going down. All the 
indicators are right. The question is, how are you going to make a truly 
good society out of this? And what kind of individual protections do we 
think should be out there? And what kind of group rules should be out 
there in terms of the absence of discrimination and the presence of 
opportunity?
    And because our country is in good shape today, we can have an 
honest, open debate. But it doesn't serve anybody to pretend that these 
differences aren't there when they, in fact, are there. So what I hope 
will come out of your gathering here is a clear and sharp understanding 
of the honest differences that are out there, of the kinds of decisions 
that will be made and the appointments that will be made to all of our 
Federal courts, beginning with the Supreme Court but including the 
courts of appeals and the district courts. And then you can do whatever 
you want with it with the American people and in your own communities 
between now and the election and thereafter.
    But I have to tell you that as someone who has been a law professor, 
been an attorney general, related to the Federal courts as a Governor, 
and then appointed people as a President to all levels of the Federal 
judiciary, it is my honest opinion that the incredibly energetic debate 
that is going on now at the Supreme Court level about the role of the 
National Government and the range of personal-privacy-related individual 
rights will only intensify in the years ahead and will be swung 
decisively one way or the other depending on the outcome of these 
elections. And to pretend otherwise is to be like an ostrich with your 
head in the sand.
    So we don't have to be hand-wringing, and we don't have to overstate 
the case, and we don't have to attack our adversaries. This is America. 
We've always had people with different views and different feelings and 
different convictions. But you're here because you have a certain take 
on what the parameters of personal liberty have to be in order for 
America to have a genuine community across all the lines that divide us. 
That's how come you're here. That's how come you belong to this 
organization. So you have to understand with great detail and clarity 
what is at stake, and then you have to be willing to share it, because, 
as I said, the American people will make a decision in this election 
which will shape the Supreme Court and the other Federal courts and the 
range of liberty and privacy and the range of acceptable national action 
for years to come.
    I think it is fair to say that with the single exception of a 
woman's right to choose, which is fairly high on the radar screen, most 
people have no earthly idea that any of these other issues are even at 
stake in this election. And a lot of people still don't really believe a 
woman's right to choose is at stake in this election. But it is. So 
those of us who are old enough to remember what it was like before Roe 
v. Wade, and those of us who care about things like the Violence Against 
Women Act and the Brady law and the other things that we believe make 
America a better country and are not so burdensome to ask the States to 
walk along with us hand in hand and work with us, we have a big job to 
do in the next 2 weeks.
    So again, Ralph, I thank you. Mary 
Frances, I thank you for your leadership 
and your passion and for always prodding me along. Whenever anybody else 
thinks I've done a great job on a civil rights issue, I get about a C-
plus from her. [Laughter] But that's her job. That's her job.
    Look--this is the last thing I'm going to say. This is a great 
country. Our diversity is making us greater, richer, and more 
interesting. But if you look around the world at all the trouble spots 
today, you see people have a whole lot of trouble dealing with folks who 
have honest

[[Page 2312]]

convictions that are different from theirs, especially if they're 
religious convictions, or if they are of different racial and ethnic 
origins which lead them into different cultural patterns of life. The 
great genius of America in the 21st century has got to be how to take 
the most diverse society we've ever had and the most diverse one in the 
world--although, interestingly enough, India is a pretty close 
competitor--and how to celebrate all this diversity and, at the same 
time, affirm our common humanity. Doing that in the context of all these 
cases that keep coming up to the Supreme Court requires a great deal of 
wisdom and understanding about what the real principles of our 
Constitution require and how the real world works and an imagination 
about how it has to work in the 21st century.
    So you're here discussing something profoundly important. I just 
don't want you--you don't have to wring your hands about it, but you do 
have to get your telephone ringing when you go home.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:19 p.m. at the National Education 
Association, prior to a panel discussion on the future of the Supreme 
Court. In his remarks, he referred to Ralph G. Neas, president, and 
Carole Shields, former president, People for the American Way.