Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am going to be brief because I know Members will be coming in here very shortly for the vote. It has been an honor to serve as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 4 years. We had a big job. The biggest assignment was filling judicial vacancies. As of this moment, we filled 214 Federal vacancies at the court level through activities of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the floor. It has been a burden, a challenge, but I want to really commend all of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan basis for working together to fill these vacancies. Over 90 percent of these vacancies were filled on a bipartisan basis. That is saying something, isn't it, in today's America, that we were able to find common ground. We didn't agree even on all of those nominees, but, certainly, there was an effort to reach across the aisle time and time again. When you take a look at the situation in the Senate during this period of time, it was a 50-50 split in the membership of the U.S. Senate for 2 of these years and a very small majority in the other 2 years, yet we were able to get this job done. This Senate Judiciary Committee, which I have served on for more than two decades, has given me the opportunity to review over 1,000 nominees for the Federal bench. President Biden's nominees represent some of the best I have ever seen and, certainly, achieved great levels of sophistication when it came to their background--professional and personal.…”