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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I am going to be brief because I know Members will be coming in here very shortly for the vote.

It has been an honor to serve as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 4 years. We had a big job. The biggest assignment was filling judicial vacancies. As of this moment, we filled 214 Federal vacancies at the court level through activities of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the floor.

It has been a burden, a challenge, but I want to really commend all of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan basis for working together to fill these vacancies. Over 90 percent of these vacancies were filled on a bipartisan basis. That is saying something, isn't it, in today's America, that we were able to find common ground. We didn't agree even on all of those nominees, but, certainly, there was an effort to reach across the aisle time and time again. When you take a look at the situation in the Senate during this period of time, it was a 50-50 split in the membership of the U.S. Senate for 2 of these years and a very small majority in the other 2 years, yet we were able to get this job done.

This Senate Judiciary Committee, which I have served on for more than two decades, has given me the opportunity to review over 1,000 nominees for the Federal bench. President Biden's nominees represent some of the best I have ever seen and, certainly, achieved great levels of sophistication when it came to their background--professional and personal.

For each judicial nominee, we require that the American Bar Association do an interview of their peers in the community and find out if there is anything that we should know about them before they go up for these lifetime appointments. I am happy to report that every single nominee from the Biden-Harris administration was found at least ``qualified,'' if not ``well qualified'' by the ABA review.

We also have indications that these members represent diversity that has never been seen before--both professional and demographic diversity--that they bring to the bench. We have confirmed more Black women to the Federal circuit courts than all the prior Presidents of the United States combined.

We confirmed the first-ever Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson--a point of personal privilege and pride for me to be part of that. She is an extraordinary Supreme Court Justice.

Beyond demographic diversity, we have professional diversity. In the past 4 years, we have confirmed more former public defenders and circuit judges than all prior Presidents combined. We have confirmed State court judges, Federal magistrates, bankruptcy judges, and prosecutors who have ample experience at the professional level before they came to this Federal opportunity.

We have confirmed jurists with experience protecting the rights of voters, workers, civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights. It is quite an array of these 214 qualified individuals.

And I might remind you that this is the vast majority. Nearly 90 percent of these confirmations have been bipartisan.

There is work to be done before we can leave here at the end of the year. Senator Schumer, as our leader, is creating opportunities for us to vote on the floor of the Senate for these lifetime appointments. Even though the work of the 118th Congress is coming to an end, our work is not done. We have 16 nominees pending on the Senate floor: 4 circuit nominees and 12 district nominees, and several more pending in committee, including 2 who will have a hearing before Thanksgiving.

There is no time to waste. The Senate must try to confirm every one of these highly qualified, diverse nominees before the sun sets on the 118th Congress. The American people deserve nothing less.

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