Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss my friend, my former colleague, and soon-to-be confirmed Federal District Judge David Barlow.

Last night, the Senate voted to invoke cloture as to Mr. Barlow's nomination. We will be voting later today to confirm him. Based on the support we have, I expect the vote to be overwhelming, and with really good reason.

David Barlow is someone I have known for a long time. He is someone I have known, in fact, for more than 30 years.

David Barlow and I first met when we were both in high school. Oddly enough, we met in Washington, DC, while we were both participating in an event known as American Legion Boys Nation. We had both attended Boys State in our respective States--I in Utah and he in Idaho--and we were both selected to go to Boys Nation to represent our respective Boys States.

Shortly after we convened as Boys Nation senators, David Barlow was elected to be the President pro temp of the Boys Nation senate. As a result, when we visited the White House a few days later, it was David Barlow who got to stand right next to Ronald Reagan as he greeted us in the Rose Garden and addressed Boys Nation.

David Barlow was someone who seemed to have been born for public service, and he was born for public service for all of the right reasons, in all of the right ways. He had a certain enthusiasm about the workings of government--not in a partisan way, not in a self- interested way but in a way that was infectious and made all around him want to build a better country, want to find common ground, and want to come to know more about our country's rich histories and tradition.

Mr. Barlow and I became reacquainted about a year after we first met, when we first enrolled as freshmen students at Brigham Young University in the fall of 1989. David Barlow was there on a full academic scholarship and did not disappoint with his academic performance. As I recall, he graduated with a 4.0 grade point average from Brigham Young University with highest honors. Here again, David was smart but in a way that didn't make other people feel less smart. He made other people feel smart and eager to learn more, eager to be more enthusiastic about the academic process. He isn't someone who would have ever talked to other people about his outstanding grades or about his wonderful accomplishments.

A few years later, we both graduated from BYU. He graduated in 1995 from Brigham Young University and enrolled at Yale Law School, where he received his jurist doctorate degree in 1998.

After he graduated, David Barlow started his legal career as an associate at the law firm then known as Lord, Bissell & Brook in the firm's Chicago office. Just a couple of years later, David joined Sidley and Austin LLP as an associate in the firm's Chicago office. He later became a partner starting, I believe, in 2006, and he remained a partner at Sidley up until 2010.

During much of that time, I was an associate at Sidley and Austin in the firm's Washington, DC, office. I got to know David again through this process, this time as a lawyer, as a professional. Although we worked in different offices, as part of the same firm, we knew the same people.

The network of lawyers with whom I worked quickly identified David Barlow as one of the lawyers in the firm who could be trusted with everything, one of the lawyers in the firm who, even as a young associate, could be given any task, and any lawyer giving him that responsibility could do so with the full assurance that the client would be well served, that no ball would be dropped, and that every stone would be turned over in an effort to properly handle the case.

Mr. Barlow worked on a wide variety of litigation matters, including complex civil litigation, class actions, and products liability cases. He also handled a number of domestic violence cases on a pro bono basis.

Among many of his clients, David Barlow became known as Dr. Barlow. It was a name assigned to him by some of his clients when he was working on some liability cases involving the medical field. He became so immersed in the subject matter of the litigation that over time he acquired more knowledge in some cases than some of the doctors who were consulting with the client on that same matter. To this day, I occasionally refer to him as Dr. Barlow just for fun.

In 2011, shortly after I had been elected to the U.S. Senate, David Barlow joined my team as my chief counsel and chief staffer on the Judiciary Committee. He is someone who had never worked in the U.S. Senate prior to that time but, literally, within a matter of weeks, had learned the ropes of this body to a degree sufficient that no one would have been able to discern the difference between Mr. Barlow and somebody who had worked in the Senate for many, many years.

He quickly became a favorite within my office. David Barlow was someone who we could always turn to in a moment if someone had a question. In a moment of crisis, he would figure out how to solve it. In a moment where we needed an answer to a legal question, he either knew the answer or, if he didn't know the answer, he could find it in a short period of time, and we could proceed with the correct understanding that, when he gave us an answer, it was right and we could rely on it.

The fact that he was so beloved within my office extended far beyond his legal acumen or his professional abilities. He is also just a delight to be around. He is really funny, and he is equally conversive in a wide variety of material, from Shakespeare to Chaucer, from the Old Testament to old episodes of ``30 Rock'' and Saturday Night Live.'' He had a sophisticated sense of humor that managed to be outrageously funny, while never inappropriate. That is a skill that we in Utah particularly strive to attain and very few are able to achieve.

Later in 2011, President Obama chose David Barlow to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Utah. This was a bittersweet moment for me and my staff, having learned to rely on his skill, but we were very happy for David and especially happy for the people of Utah, who were the beneficiaries of his outstanding service as the U.S. attorney. Having previously worked in that U.S. Attorney's Office myself as an assistant U.S. attorney, I stayed in contact with many of my former colleagues, all of whom came to absolutely love this outstanding public servant.

David served as U.S. attorney through 2014, at which point he returned to his partnership at Sidley Austin and worked in the firm's Washington, DC, office. In 2017, he joined Walmart as vice president over compliance for the company's health and wellness business. I still remember the moment when someone reviewing him for that position, prior to the time he had been offered the job, called to ask me what I thought about his qualifications for that job. I explained at the outset to this reviewer that my comments regarding David Barlow would be so overwhelmingly positive that she would think I was joking. I was, in fact, not.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, needless to say, he got the job. He flourished there as he has everywhere else.

Then, in 2018, David Barlow, to the great happiness of many of us in Utah who know and love him, decided to return to Utah, and he joined Dorsey & Whitney, LLP, as a partner in the firm's Salt Lake City office. For the past several years, David Barlow has had a practice that has focused on handling government enforcement actions and internal investigations, which have typically been large multijurisdictional matters. He is someone who knows how to handle complex litigation.

I would also like to note that since I first met David Barlow, I have also gotten to know David Barlow's family. They are extraordinary people--David's wife Crystal and their children. David's parents, Bruce and Emily Barlow, in fact, used to live just a couple of doors down from me in Utah. They are as kind and decent a people as you could ever hope to meet. While one's parents certainly can't independently qualify one for service in a lifetime article III judicial appointment, if ever one could qualify through that route, that would probably qualify him here simply because Bruce and Emily Barlow are perhaps the most kind and decent people I have ever met and the warmest and loveliest neighbors anyone could ever hope to have.

For all these reasons, and based on Mr. Barlow's mastery of the law, his professionalism, his kindness, his demeanor, his collegiality, which I have never heard questioned or in any way called into question, David Barlow is qualified to be a U.S. district judge, and I am grateful that he will be serving once he is confirmed as judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah.

I urge my colleagues to support his confirmation and look forward to voting for him later today. Cloture Motion

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