May 23
You might remember an old journal entry I wrote about judicial confirmations in the US Senate. And while I am sure that almost none of you care, I have a quick follow up. Here is a letter that my mom received from Senator Barack OBama.
Thank you for registering your opinion on the debate in the Senate over the confirmation of federal judges. I appreciate knowing your views.
This debate extends beyond the approval of individual judges to the validity of a much broader principle — namely, how the Founding Fathers envisioned the Senate resolving its differences of opinion. The Senate has now confirmed 208 of the judges President Bush has nominated. That gives the President a 95% approval record – better than any President has had in the last 25 years. And for a President who received 51% of the vote and a Senate chamber made up of 55% of the President’s party, I would say that confirming 95% of your judicial nominations is a pretty good record. Yet, some of Senators still want more. After getting 208 of their judges through, they want them all.
It is understandable to want to have it your way. But this kind of politics is not what people sent us here to do. They do not expect one party – be it Republican or Democrat – to change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet. They do not expect the Senate to be a rubber stamp for whatever the President wants.
When I came to the Illinois Senate, Republicans were in control. And in the first seven years I was in the minority, Republicans called all the shots, and it was tough for Democrats to get anything done. And then there was redistricting, and a few years later, the Democrats were in charge. Now they call all the shots. And the Democrats pay little attention to the Republicans.
This is not the kind of politics we want in the United States Senate. This is not what our founders intended when they crafted our democratic institutions. They designed the system, as frustrating as it may sometimes be, to ensure that there is some level of broad consensus before the country moves forward on the issues important to the American public.
Finally, I find it interesting that some of my more conservative colleagues who have expressed such righteous concern about “activist judges” are not more concerned about some of the President’s nominees. For example, the Houston Chroniclehas reported that Judge Priscilla Owen’s record on the Texas Supreme Court showed “less interest in impartially interpreting the law than in pushing an agenda.” And the current Attorney General of the United States, Judge Alberto Gonzales, as Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, criticized his colleague, Judge Owen, for trying to rewrite law from the bench to impose her own beliefs. Similar concerns have been raised about Janice Rogers Brown’s record on the California Supreme Court, William Myers’ tenure at the Department of the Interior, Judge Boyle’s rulings on the Federal District Court and William Pryor’s service as Alabama Attorney General.
Today, the country faces rising gas prices, skyrocketing tuition costs, a record number of uninsured Americans, and some of the most serious national security threats in our history. These are challenges we all want to meet and problems we all want to solve. But if the right of free and open debate is taken away from the minority party and the millions of Americans who asked us to be their voice, I fear that the already partisan atmosphere of Washington will be poisoned to the point where no one will be able to agree on anything. That fails to serve anyone’s best interests, and it certainly is unfaithful to the intent of the patriots who founded our democracy.
In other news I just spent a bunch of money that I can’t really afford to buy some new computer parts that I don’t really need. I have been whining about my processor on occasion for the past few months. This afternoon I tried to play a game but my computer wasn’t in the mood. I politely asked my computer to suck it up and load the stupid game, to which my computer responded by shooting itself in the head. The computer rebooted to a message along the lines of “Catastrophic Failure”. Fortunately, the good thing with a slow computer is that I am able to simply rip out the defective brain and replace it with something better. And so voila! new motherboard, new processor, new memory.
Color me upgraded. +2 intelligence +3 agility