Political Quotes

“I would like to focus this morning on our constitutional responsibility to confirm judges. Virginia is one of the five states covered by the Fourth Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Today, one third of the seats on the Fourth Circuit are vacant. One seat on the bench has been vacant for ten years--longer than any other seat in the country. The U.S. Judicial Conference has called filling that seat a ``judicial emergency,'' and Chief Justice William Rehnquist has warned that ``vacancies cannot remain at such high levels indefinitely without eroding the quality of justice that traditionally has been associated with the federal judiciary.'' The problem with this argument is that it substitutes ``efficiency'' for ``justice'' in our judicial system. Certainly it would be more efficient to have criminal cases decided by one juror instead of twelve, but our Founding Fathers wisely determined that a variety of views in the jury room would be more likely to yield a result that was ``right,'' and ``fair.''”