Jeff Bingaman: “It strikes me that the job of Congress is to appropriate funds for the Federal courts to administer justice as best they…”

“It strikes me that the job of Congress is to appropriate funds for the Federal courts to administer justice as best they see fit. I am wondering why we are trying to wade in and specify how this particular Federal judge administered the implementation of the consent decree which has been entered in his court. It strikes me that we have Federal courts all over the country and we have consent decrees in place in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases all over the country. Here we are, singling out one of those cases and saying we are going to step in and specify how a Federal judge in the future should implement the administration of that consent decree. It just seems to me that we are micromanaging, in the worst possible way, and really stepping into an area that the Congress should stay out of. We should get on with the business that we were given to do under the Constitution, which is to pass appropriations bills, and we should let the courts administer the cases that are before them.”