-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, there are parts of this letter which I find incredible. We received it late last night.

As I mentioned before, Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars of undisclosed gifts to this Supreme Court Justice over a period of 20 years, now refuses to tell us anything about what those gifts involved, how much was spent, who was there, what this was all about. He says he can't tell us that because we don't have any authority in Congress over that branch of government--the Supreme Court.

Well, he is wrong about that. It turns out, the ethics laws that we passed in Congress in years gone by have been upheld by other courts and followed by them, but it is only one court in the land that has decided it won't follow those standards. The highest Court in the land has decided it will have the lowest ethical standards.

It is hard to understand. Here is Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire, spending all this money on one Supreme Court Justice, saying that we cannot, in Congress, ask hard questions about the ethical standards of the highest Court in the land because it would put undue influence on the Court.

Bottom line: Undue influence is what this is all about. No one should be able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Senator, a Congressman, or certainly a Supreme Court Justice without full disclosure and compliance with the law.

For the Supreme Court to say that is asking for too much, I think the American people can draw their own conclusions. They have a right to know, if Harlan Crow thinks our passing an ethics code for the Supreme Court would put undue influence on the Court, how does he explain spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on gifts, trips, on yachts, and chartered airplanes for a Supreme Court Justice? Is he not seeking undue influence on the same Court? It is obvious that it is true.

What surprised me after I received this letter--and, once again, was offended by the logic of it, if there is any--at the end of the day, I looked online today to find that this attorney, Michael Bopp, is saying that he made an offer now to meet with the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I read the letter for a third time. And I thought, how did I happen to miss that? Well, it turns out it is the final sentence in the letter. And I would like to read it to you.

Please feel free to have your staff contact me with any questions concerning this response and to set up a time to further discuss your requests.

That, I suppose, is the offer to meet. I am not going to turn it down. We are going to meet with him if he wishes to discuss this further.

But before we go any further than that conversation about this committee, let me make a reference to the bottom line in this controversy. Chief Justice John Roberts, the person that this Court is named after, as all Chief Justices are--the Roberts Court has the authority this afternoon, before 5 o'clock, to announce a resolution to resolve this issue once and forever, to make sure that the Court steps away from the sordid affair with the right conclusion. To put a code of ethics in a standard of ethical conduct in place will bring this Court into the same world of reality as the rest of the courts in the United States.

The American people need to have confidence in this Court. And hiding gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars, not disclosing, and paying no price when they are finally discovered is not the way to convince the American people that the Court is credible.

We are going to continue in the Senate Judiciary Committee to do all that we need to do to get to the bottom of this controversy. The American people have a right to believe in this Court, as they do in this Congress. And we have to do everything under our power to make sure that happens.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source