Political Quotes

“I would like to thank the gentleman from Maryland for coordinating this discussion, and I thank Ranking Member Conyers for yielding. Madam Speaker, a Supreme Court sitting with only eight Justices, including the Chief Justice, is not good for democracy. The failure by the Senate to consider our President's nominee because of the electoral cycle is an abdication of constitutional responsibility that is without precedent and without reason. Now, I am best known to my colleagues as the last Ph.D. scientist in Congress or perhaps as the businessman who founded a company with his brother that now manufactures most of the theater lighting equipment in the United States. What is less well known is that I am also the son of a civil rights lawyer who wrote much of the enforcement language behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like me, my father was a scientist, and he stepped away from his career in science to become a civil rights lawyer. There was a decade between the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that held that racially segregated school systems were inherently unequal and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My father spent most of that decade traveling around the South, advising school boards and Federal judges on the nuts and bolts of school desegregation. In August of 1969, President Richard Nixon nominated Judge Clement F. Haynsworth to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.…”