Sam Brownback: “I will speak to the pending business, which is the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the circuit court of appeals. She is…”

“I will speak to the pending business, which is the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the circuit court of appeals. She is a highly qualified person who really needs to be recognized. We need to move through this rapidly. The last 2 years, I was honored to be able to serve on the Judiciary Committee. We held extensive hearings on Priscilla Owen to be a circuit court judge. She went through those hearings in an extraordinary fashion. It was a learning experience. It was as if a professor was there teaching and going through with us, here is how I decided this case, here is hornbook law on this, here is how this should be decided, here is how I viewed the issue. She really has a fine-tuned legal mind. I was impressed by the legal mind she has. I was impressed by the common sense she had with it as well. It was as if this was a highly trained legal mind well adapted to being able to judge, but also with a sense of values of the people, which is as one would expect because she was elected to the Texas Supreme Court. She has been around the public. She knows how people think. When a lot of people look at the judiciary in the United States, they do not feel like they get a sensible approach to judging a fair amount of time. She is an extraordinary person to have both that depth of mental training and ability and a sensible touch that the people really desire and want to have in somebody on the judiciary.”