Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to talk about the pace of judicial confirmations with my friends, the Senator from Hawaii and the Senator from Massachusetts, who have been real leaders on this issue. Well, we have only one more day of legislative session before Congress breaks until September. It is an appropriate time to take stock of how the majority has handled their job of scheduling and confirming judges. More than a year into this new Congress, the Republican leadership has allowed only 22 judges to be confirmed--only 22. In the last 2 years of the Bush administration with a Democratic majority--the mirror situation of what we are in today--there were 68. So that is 68 versus 22. The Republican majority is confirming judges at the slowest rate in more than 60 years. This has real consequences across America. Vacancies have risen from 43 to 83 since Republicans took over the majority; 29 have been judicial emergencies. I know that in my city of Buffalo in Western New York we had an emergency. We have one of the busiest courts, and for a while we had no judges. Now we have one. At this point in time in the Bush administration, with Democrats in control of the Senate, we had reduced the number to 39. That is half as many vacancies as now exist.…”