Prepared Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
On the Nomination of
Jennifer Dorsey, to be United States District Court Judge for the District of Nevada
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Mr. President,
I rise in opposition to the nomination of Jennifer Dorsey, to be United States District Judge for the District of Nevada. Before I outline the basis for my opposition, I want to inform my fellow Senators and American people regarding the facts on judicial nominations.
We continue to hear from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle about how we are obstructing nominees or treating this President different. Those complaints are without foundation and I’ll quantify my answer to prove the point.
There is no crisis in the manner in which we are confirming nominees. This is all part of a larger strategy to justify breaking the rules of the United States Senate to change the rules of the United States Senate. The fact is, after today, the Senate will have confirmed 199 lower court nominees; we have defeated two. That’s 199-2. Who can complain about that record? The success rate happens to be 99 percent, for the nominees considered on the floor of United States Senate sent up here by President Obama.
And we have been doing that at a fast pace. During the last Congress we confirmed more judges than any Congress since the 103rd Congress, which was 1993-94.
This year, we have already confirmed more judges than were confirmed in the entire first year of President Bush’s second term. So far this year we have confirmed 27 judges. If confirmed, Ms. Dorsey will be the 28th confirmation this year.
So, let’s compare this with a similar stage, which would be President Bush’s second term when only ten judicial nominees had been confirmed. So we are now at a 28 to 10 comparison, with President Obama clearly ahead of where President Bush was.
And, as I said, we’ve already confirmed more nominees this year – 28 – than we did during the entirety of 2005, the first year of President Bush’s second term, when 21 lower court judges were confirmed.
After today, only three Article III judges remain on the Executive Calendar – two district nominees and one circuit nominee. Yet, we hear the same old story. Somehow, our friends on the other side of the aisle, the Senate Majority, the Senate Democrats, cite this as evidence of obstructionism.
Compare that to the calendar of June 2004, when 30 judicial nominations were on the Calendar – 10 circuit and 20 district. I don’t recall any Senate Democrats complaining about how many nominations were piling up on the calendar.
Nor do I remember protests from my colleagues on the other side that judicial nominees were moving too slowly. Some of those nominees had been reported out more than a year earlier and most were pending for months. And some of them, you know, never got an up or down vote.
The bottom line is that the Senate is processing the President’s nominees exceptionally fairly and I don’t know why that message can’t get through. Their complaint of obstructionism is merely an excuse to abuse the rules of the United States Senate. President Obama certainly is being treated more fairly in the beginning of his second term than Senate Democrats treated President Bush in 2005.
It is not clear to me how allowing more votes so far this year than President Bush got in an entire year amounts to “unprecedented delays and obstruction.” Yet, that is the complaint we hear over and over and over again from the other side.
So I just wanted to set the record straight. It is a sad commentary that I have to spend so much time when the figures speak for themselves. So I wanted to set the record straight—again—before we vote on the confirmation of Ms. Dorsey.
I have concerns with this particular nominee. I think all members are aware of the press accounts of campaign contributions which were made at the time this nomination was under consideration. We have not received a full explanation of what took place. Nevertheless, I am concerned about the appearances of these contributions and how such actions might undermine public confidence that our citizenry must have in the judicial branch of our government.
I also have concerns about Ms. Dorsey’s qualifications to be a federal judge. She has no criminal law experience. She has participated in only six trials, one as sole counsel, one as first chair, and four as second chair. I am concerned that her lack of experience will be a problem if she is on the bench.
It is not surprising to me that The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary gave her a partial “Not Qualified” rating.
I am also concerned with her understanding of the proper role of a judge. While in law school, she wrote a note that praised the Justices who wrote Roe v. Wade. She praised them for the willingness to “forge ahead to create a just outcome without regard to the usual decisional restraints” and “the majority made the ‘just’ decision and then forced history and stare decisis to fit with that decision”.
Understand this about her: Ms. Dorsey praised judges who made their decision, and I want to use her words: “without regard to usual decisional restraints”. Those are not the kind of judges we want – those are activist judges who impose their own policy preferences rather than following the enacted laws or precedent. So what do we want? We want judges who will be restrained by precedent and by the laws that Congress passes.
Although Ms. Dorsey said that she no longer supports what she once wrote, I am unconvinced that she will be able to lay her policy preferences aside when they conflict with what the law dictates she do.
For all the reasons I mentioned above, I cannot support this nominee.
I have two news articles that describe the campaign contribution issue I discussed earlier and I ask unanimous consent that these be entered into the record.
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