On the recordFebruary 28, 2012
I come to the floor today to discuss our broken judicial confirmation process. I know many of my colleagues will discuss individual nominees and how long they have languished on the executive calendar without a vote. We can point to many statistics about the length of time it takes to confirm President Obama's nominees versus President Bush's and how many nominees each had confirmed in their first term. This is an important argument to make. And while these statistics are helpful in highlighting the problem, they are merely the symptoms of a much larger disease--a broken Senate. Since joining the Senate in 2009, I've said repeatedly that we must take decisive action to reform our rules in order to restore deliberativeness to this body. At the beginning of this Congress, Senators Harkin, Merkley, and I tried to do that. Ultimately, our success was limited. We didn't achieve the broad reforms we wanted. But we did initiate a debate that highlighted some of the most egregious abuses of the rules, including how the rules are manipulated to obstruct the confirmation process for judges and executive branch nominees. There was some hope that the debate we had, along with the modest reforms that were adopted, would encourage both sides of the aisle to restore the respect and comity that is often lacking in today's Senate. Unfortunately, any goodwill rapidly deteriorated and the partisan rancor and political brinksmanship quickly returned.…
