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Floor Speech
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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, like a number of my colleagues who are here today, I want to support the Senate resolution affirming the rule of law and the legitimacy of judicial review, and I thank Senator Durbin for bringing it to the floor.
I am here with a lot of regret and sadness in a way. We should have pride in our uniquely just and democratic system that puts the rule of law above everything else. But my regret, my sadness, is that there was a time in this country when the other side of the aisle would have been speaking for this resolution as well and would have been not just accepting but advocating robustly, not just in rhetoric but in action that we reaffirm our allegiance to the rule of law and the legitimacy of courts scrutinizing what we do to make sure that we stay within the Constitution and the rule of law.
We are here because, in effect, that basic consensus and acceptance seems to be dissipating, perhaps even shredding.
The Founders were far from perfect, and one of their great virtues was to recognize their imperfection. So they devised a system that precluded anybody from being fully in power of everything. They lived under an autocracy--the monarchy--that sent English soldiers into their homes, allowed them to take people and property without any kind of approval; in effect, subjected them to a loss of liberty that they regarded as their fundamental rights as Englishmen.
In fact, our system of constitutional rule owes a lot to the English system, the Magna Carta. We all know the history from our law school days.
From my law school days, I remember well my professor expounding with great reverence this idea that, in our country, courts can override the excesses of a legislature or an executive. It is not a simple proposition. I will grant you, in a democracy, the idea of a U.S. Supreme Court, the highest Court in the land, appointed for life nine people--the number has varied--without any election, able to override the two popularly elected branches of government seems totally anomalous and undemocratic. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court, as a check, as an enforcer of that balance, has played a critical role throughout our history in enforcing our rights and preserving them. And at times, it has failed--Dred Scott, Korematsu. The U.S. Supreme Court is far from perfect too. But in our system, we are a government of people observing and enforcing the law.
In the days when I thought there would be no question that following court orders should be a basic tenet, certainly, for lawyers who are steeped in the culture of following the law--after all, what good is it to be debating in court before a judge if the losing party simply disregards the outcome?
So I come with sadness and regret because we face today a growing and more popularly accepted idea that those court orders need not be obeyed; that judicial review is not the acceptable tenet of our Constitution that it has been for centuries; and that, perhaps, maybe this President should not be bound by what the courts say.
That is so fundamentally dangerous to our democracy that we are here today simply to make a statement that this resolution affirming the rule of law and the legitimacy of judicial review is necessary at this moment.
I am not going to go into all of the history that Senator Klobuchar recited so well and eloquently or colleagues have done as well. We don't blindly follow the edicts or orders of individuals in this country, elected or not, but all of us in this Chamber, all of us who have served in the military, all of us who served in any public office for the public raise our right hand, and we swear an oath not to the President, not to the majority leader, not to any potentate or officeholder, we swear to the Constitution. That is an oath that we take to the Constitution and the laws of the United States, so help me God. That is the oath that requires us to obey the courts insofar as they articulate the laws and the Constitution.
Like the Founders and the Supreme Court, lower courts may be far from perfect too. That is why we have not just judicial review of executive and legislative branches but also within our judiciary review and appeals, not just once but twice, and within State court systems as well, and then from State courts to our Federal courts.
I want to just close by saying I spent most of my career as a lawyer going to court, trying cases, arguing before judges. I can tell you, some of those decisions were just dead wrong, just so wrong as to make my blood boil.
And whether it was for a client or for the United States of America, when I was a U.S. attorney and the decision went against me, for the people of the United States, or the people of Connecticut, when I was attorney general and the decision went against me, I was angry. But it never crossed my mind that I should just disobey. And the reason is that the larger good, the longer range public interest is served when those court orders are obeyed; and that, sometimes, whether it is Dred Scott or Korematsu, the appeal is to history, the appeal is to the future, to a moral conscience or a legislative chain or someone sensing deep in their gut that an injustice has been done.
And that is the kind of system that has survived, these centuries, as the American experiment. We believe in the possibility of change and reform but not by disobeying a judiciary that serves ultimately to prevent autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny.
One of the lessons of tyranny in the 20th century that Professor Tim Snyder cites in his book ``On Tyranny''--one of the first lessons of 20 lessons on tyranny in the 20th century--is do not obey in advance. Do not obey in advance. That is not to say we don't obey court orders. It is to say we do not obey in advance what a dictator tells us to do.
And when a dictator or a would-be tyrant says, ``Don't follow court decisions,'' we have an obligation to speak up and stand up. And that is what we are doing through this resolution.
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