Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to speak on the nomination of Jane Stranch--a vote we will be taking here in about 45 minutes--nominated to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. It is always with a great deal of reluctance that I oppose a nominee for the bench. Most of the people who are nominated are nominally qualified, in that they have records as attorneys or sometimes as judges in lower courts, have recommendations from bar associations and the like. But occasionally it is necessary to oppose a nominee. And while I certainly acknowledge that Jane Stranch has the qualifications one would expect of a nominee for a court of this significance, I oppose her nomination because of a very troubling development that I see in several nominations. At some point I think it is important to draw the line and say that the President has got to be very careful not to nominate people who have--and in this case who have not--taken, in my view, a strong enough position against applying foreign law to interpret the American Constitution or to interpret American laws that apply to cases before them. We have seen this before in nominees, in then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor. When she had her Supreme Court hearing, several of us on this side of the aisle raised the question with respect to her position on foreign law. In many respects she said: Don't worry, I won't apply foreign law. Then in one of the cases in her first term as a Supreme Court Justice she did exactly that.…”