Political Quotes

“first, let me thank my three colleagues for joining me on the floor today. A word that came up repeatedly was ``reverence,'' and I want to start with that word because I think we all do share a reverence for the institution of the Supreme Court. And that is what makes it so bitter, to see how badly the Supreme Court is failing us now and to see the paths that billionaire influence has led it down. It has to correct, and if it is not going to correct itself, then Congress is going to have to correct it. As Senator Blumenthal said, the problem here is that there is no ethics process for the Supreme Court. There is a perfectly good code of ethics for all of the Justices and for all of the Federal judges, but there is no way to enforce it for the Supreme Court. If you have a complaint about a Supreme Court Justice, there is nowhere to file it. There is not even an inbox, and if there were an inbox and complaints came through, there is nobody on the other side of the inbox to screen out the nutty ones from the legitimate ones. And once you have a pile of legitimate ones, there is no staff attorney to do the basic research into what are the facts here. At the end of the day, when you have the facts determined and the judge or Justices have their say, then you have the factual predicate to compare with the ethics standard and a neutral decider to decide whether or not it comports. That is the basic structure of U.S.…”