Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, today I rise to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. This is an issue I will return to in the coming weeks and months at greater length, but I did want to say a few words about why I am in opposition to Mr. Kavanaugh.
I think many Americans have a pretty good sense of what the function of Congress is and what the President of the United States does, but, in fact, I think many Americans do not fully appreciate the role that the Supreme Court plays in our lives. In the past decade alone, the Supreme Court has issued some incredibly controversial and, to my mind, disastrous decisions that have had a profound impact on the lives of the American people.
Let me review for a moment why this nomination is so very important by looking at what the Supreme Court, often by a 5-to-4 vote--a one- vote majority--has done in recent years. If you go out onto the streets of any community in the United States of America--whether it is a conservative area or a progressive area--what most people will tell you is that we have a corrupt campaign finance system--a system that today, as we speak, allows billionaires to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy elections. Most Americans, whether they are Democrats or Republicans or Independents, do not think that is what American democracy is supposed to be about. What most people think is that the majority should rule. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, but everybody gets a vote--not a situation in which billionaires can spend unlimited sums of money to support candidates who represent their interests. That is, in fact, what goes on right now.
Many Americans may think that was a decision made by Congress, made by the President. That is not so. That disastrous decision that is undermining American democracy came about by a 5-to-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
That is what a Supreme Court decision can do. It can undermine American democracy and create a situation where the very wealthiest people in this country can buy politicians and influence legislation.
Several years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, but the Court also ruled that the Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act had to be optional for States.
I am on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which helped to write that bill. I can tell you that there was almost no discussion--I don't recall any discussion--about whether or not that legislation would apply and all elements of the legislation would apply to every State in the country.
The Supreme Court ruled that this was not the case. They said that the decision of expanding Medicaid was up to the States. Today, we have 17 States in our country that still have not expanded Medicaid. What that means in English--in real terms--is that today there are millions and millions of people, in 17 States in this country, who are ill, people who can't afford healthcare, people who are literally dying because they don't go to the doctor when they should, and that is all because of a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is not only the issue of campaign finance or the issue of Medicaid and healthcare where the Supreme Court has acted in a disastrous way. I think everybody knows that our country has a very, very shameful history in terms of civil rights. It has been a very long and hard struggle for us to finally say that in America, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of your economic position, you have the right to vote. It is not a radical idea, but it is a struggle for which very brave people fought for many decades.
In 1965 the Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act, which had the impact of eliminating racial discrimination in voting. That Act, passed by Congress, has been reauthorized multiple times since. In other words, what Congress said is that everybody in this country has the right to vote, regardless of the color of your skin.
In 2013 the Supreme Court--again, by a 5-to-4 vote--ruled that parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were outdated, and they struck down a major part of that law that guaranteed that all Americans had the right to vote. Literally days after that decision was rendered by the Supreme Court, officials in State after State responded by enacting voting restrictions targeted at African Americans, poor people, young people, and other groups of citizens who don't traditionally vote Republican.
Literally days after that Supreme Court decision, State officials said: Wow, we now have the opportunity to make it harder for our political opponents to vote.
They moved very, very quickly with restrictive voting rights laws. That situation was created by, once again, a 5-to-4 vote by a conservative Supreme Court.
Just this year, we saw the Supreme Court rule against unions in a really outrageous decision in the Janus case, designed to weaken the ability of workers and public employees to negotiate fair contracts. Just this year, we saw the Supreme Court uphold President Trump's Muslim ban and other important pieces of legislation.
This is already a Supreme Court that, given the option, will rule, as they have time and again, often by a 5-to-4 vote, in favor of corporations and the wealthy and against working people; that will continue to undermine civil rights, voting rights, and access to healthcare; that are edging closer and closer to ruling that a person's religious beliefs should exempt them from following civil rights laws.
Having said that, let me say very briefly why I oppose the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh. As it happens, I do not usually believe anything that President Trump says because I think, sadly, that he is a pathological liar, but I do think this is a moment where we should believe one thing that he said during the campaign. I think, in this instance, he was actually telling the truth. During the campaign, he was asked if he wanted to see the Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that protects a woman's right in this country to control her own body. He responded to that question:
Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that's really what's going to be--that will happen. And that'll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.
That is Donald Trump during the campaign.
On a separate occasion, as many recall, Trump suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. I have very little doubt that while he may evade the question of whether or not he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade--I have zero doubt--he would not have been appointed by Donald Trump unless that is exactly what he will do.
As I think we all know, President Trump put forth a list of 25 potential justices, all of whom were handpicked by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. These two extreme rightwing groups claim they have ``no idea'' how any of the people on that list would rule on Roe v. Wade, but overruling Roe has been a Republican dream for 40 years. Please do not insult our intelligence by suggesting it is possible that any of these candidates could secretly support a woman's right to control her own body. That will not be the case.
That brings us to Judge Kavanaugh. You may remember that last year the Federal Government was sued by an undocumented teenage girl they were keeping in detention in Texas. She discovered that she was pregnant while in detention and tried to obtain an abortion. Judge Kavanaugh wanted to force her to delay the proceeding, presumably until it was no longer legal under Texas law for her to obtain an abortion in that State. When he was overruled by the full DC Circuit, he complained in a dissent that his colleagues were creating a right to ``abortion on demand.'' Does that sound like someone who is going to strike down State laws that create undue barriers to abortion access, or does it sound like somebody who had no problem with forcing a teenage girl to carry a pregnancy to term?
There is also another case percolating out of Texas that could have even graver consequences for tens of millions of Americans. The State of Texas and 17 other Republican States have sued the Federal Government, claiming that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, and the Department of Justice under Donald Trump agrees with them. While I do not know how Judge Kavanaugh would rule on this case--nobody could, of course, know that--I will note that in another case about the ACA, he suggested that the President could simply refuse to enforce laws that he deems unconstitutional, regardless of what the Courts say.
What we are dealing with here is, literally, a life-and-death decision regarding preexisting conditions, regarding the issue of whether today you have cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or some other life-threatening illness. Before the Affordable Care Act, an insurance company could say to you: Oh, you have a history of cancer, we are not going to insure you because we can't make money out of you because that cancer might recur. It might be: You are too sick and we are going to lose money on your case and we are not going to insure you or, if we do insure you, your rates are going to be five times higher than somebody else's of your age.
One of the major achievements of the Affordable Care Act, which was supported by 90 percent of the American people, is that we must not end the protections the American people have today against insurance companies that would bring back preexisting conditions--that would discriminate against people who were ill. It is very likely that case will come before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet 90 percent of the American people say we should not discriminate against people who have cancer or heart disease and that insurance companies should not be allowed to deny them coverage or raise their rates to levels that people cannot afford.
The Trump administration has supported the argument of the Republican Governors and will not defend the ACA in court, which will come to the Supreme Court. Unless I am very mistaken, Judge Kavanaugh will vote with the rightwing majority and allow discrimination against people who have serious illnesses to, once again, be the law of the land.
Time and again, Judge Kavanaugh has sided with the interests of corporations and the wealthy instead of the interests of ordinary Americans. He has sided with electric power utilities and chemical companies over protecting clean air and fighting climate change.
He has argued, if you can believe it, that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved consumers billions and billions of dollars from the greed and illegal behavior of Wall Street and financial institutions, is unconstitutional because its structure does not give enough power to the President. He has also argued against net neutrality.
He dissented in an OSHA case and argued that SeaWorld should not be fined for the death of one of its whale trainers because the trainer should have accepted the risk of death as a routine part of the job.
While nobody can predict the future, we can take a hard look at Judge Kavanaugh's record and extrapolate from his decisions what kind of Supreme Court Justice he will be. I think the evidence is overwhelming that he will be part of the 5-to-4 majority, which has cast decision after decision against the needs of working people, against the needs of the poor, and against the rights of the American people to vote freely, without restrictions.
This is an issue to which I will return. I just want the American people to understand, when they hear this debate taking place here and think, well, it is the same ol' same ol'--with people yelling at each other--that this is an enormously important decision which will impact the lives of tens and tens of millions of people. I hope very much that the American people become engaged on this issue, learn about Judge Kavanaugh's record, and join with those of us who are in opposition to his nomination.
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