Judicial Nominees

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Virginia.

As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I have seen what is going on here. We get these nominations through our committee, and then they vanish into thin air. You can look at the numbers with what is going on here. You have a situation where President Bush had 100 circuit and district court confirmations during the first 2 years of his Presidency. To date, President Obama has only 18. There are literally dozens of nominees waiting.

Why does this matter? We can spend the whole morning spouting numbers
and talking about the times and differences between the months. Why does it matter? This is about a drug dealer who doesn't get prosecuted, someone who is running a drug ring, because there is not a judge to bring the case in front of. I was a prosecutor running an office of 400 people, and I saw what would happen if we didn't have judges. It is also about a felon in possession of a gun, and they can't bring up his case because they have a heavy docket of criminal, civil, and corporate cases, and because of this you cannot get criminals off the street. Or this is about complicated white-collar crimes such as the one with Bernie Madoff. In a recent case in Minnesota, there was a lengthy trial involving a guy who got a 50-year sentence. If we don't have the judges to handle these things, criminals will be out there committing crimes. That is what this is about.

I will say this before I turn it over to my colleague, the Senator from New Hampshire. President Bush had 100 circuit and district court confirmations during the first 2 years of his Presidency. Today, President Obama has 18. If we are going to hit this hundred number and get 82 more judges confirmed, we are going to have to do nearly 3 per week.

The new Members of the Senate are here to say let's get this done because justice delayed is justice denied.

I turn this over to Senator Shaheen.

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