Douglas Alexander: “The people are entitled to two things. One is to have their constitutional and Federal rights enforced in the Federal…”

“The people are entitled to two things. One is to have their constitutional and Federal rights enforced in the Federal courts. This will continue under this legislation. But they are also entitled to have democratically elected leaders that can make the policy decisions and do the governing, which is what we say to the rest of the world. We are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, sacrificing lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to promote the idea that people have a right to elect their own officials, yet we have drifted into the situation somewhere, as in the Tennessee case, where we have four prior consent decrees that will leave in the Federal courts these decisions and the Governor cannot change them.”