Mazie Hirono

Making sure that there are no financial barriers to care is important to our most medically compromised veterans.

Thanks to the leadership of Senators Tester and Boozman on the Deborah Sampson Act, we have an opportunity to take this head-on.

I urge you to consider carefully the message that Congress supporting a more inclusive motto sends to the women veterans back in your home States.

Senator Hirono's bill extends this protection to VA employees, who are 'Title 38 employees' and don't have the same level of protection as 'Title 5' Federal employees.

North Korea is committed to developing long-range missile technology.

Well, give me a number.

But our credibility is our currency. So the minute you undertake actions that undermine credibility, that has a profound effect in the region in terms of how we are perceived.

I think it was important for Secretary Mattis to visit Japan and South Korea as his first official secretarial duties.

So there could not be a single, more important signal of United States staying power in the region than something like APSI that is investing in the things that constitute the United States security presence in Asia.

I think those two questions are completely connected to each other in the sense that our effectiveness in being able to get China to do more, or to signal to North Korea the credibility of our deterrence, or any of our policies, greatly…

I am deeply troubled about the potential impact that this proposed funding cut would have to the cybersecurity for energy delivery systems R&D program.

I have come to the conclusion that originalism is used as a tool and a justification to restrict the rights of vulnerable Americans.

We are seeing States and localities put voting restrictions on the books that not only have a discriminatory effect.

They made it very plain their discriminatory intent.

So my question really was whether you think that, on the Supreme Court, he would continue a very restrained view of workers' rights.

It matters a great deal for our rights what is the judicial philosophy or, as my colleague, Senator Blumenthal, would put it, core beliefs of the judges who serve on the Supreme Court.

The real-life impact of the Shelby County decision was that 13 States passed laws that could be deemed voter suppression laws.

And after the obstacles to voting we have seen since Shelby County, we now know that Congress got it right, that the evidence showed a continuing need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court got it wrong when it…

Both the process and the outcome in the Shelby County case raise exactly the kind of concerns that make it so important for us on the Committee and in the Senate to understand your judicial philosophy.

Many of them cited that speech to justify their opposition to her nomination.

Apples and oranges do not begin to describe the differences between what Donald Trump said and what we are seeking to do here.

Some have even gone so far as to conflate the questions we are raising about your record in the course of our advise and consent responsibilities with Donald Trump's abhorrent attacks on Federal judges.

But by tilting the political playing field so heavily to toward corporations and against individuals, has the Court not impacted the composition of who is in Congress and made it, therefore, even harder for Congress to take meaningful…

Well, clearly, elections have an impact on the composition of the Court because we have you. We do not have Judge Merrick Garland.

So given your clear understanding of the relationship between the political process and the courts, would you acknowledge that these decisions, Shelby County and Citizens United, have had an impact on our elections?