Political Quotes

“while we are waiting for the next speaker to arrive, I wanted to take a moment and discuss the brief Senator McCain and I filed in the Supreme Court last week. It can be found at http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/?id=e3ba7f1b-d132 4aef-b5bc-c49fd711fc51. The Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision was in a difficult situation. No member of the Court had ever run in an election for office. It may be the first time in the history of a country that no member of the Supreme Court had ever run for office, so it is a Supreme Court that as a corporate group was uniquely inexperienced in the actual ins and outs of elections and politics. Moreover, the way the Citizens United case came up to the Court, the question they ended up deciding is one that they asked for additional briefing on. It is a question that, in many respects, the Court raised itself. And so the Court did not have the benefit of the usual process of a case beginning in the trial court and amassing a record of evidence, of testimony, of witnesses, of a review of all of that at the appellate court level, and then final review at the Supreme Court. So they did something very unusual. They actually made a finding of fact. A finding of fact is not something Supreme Courts are supposed to do in the first instance. That is the job of the trial judge and the jury, if there is a jury trial. Those are the fact-finders in our system of law.…”