- yesterday
During remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) spoke about the nomination of Emil Bove.
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00:00Mr. President.
00:04Senator from Illinois.
00:06First thank the Senator from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal,
00:09who really brings a level of expertise and experience to the Judiciary Committee and the Senate that is really unmatched.
00:18He's been a friend and a faithful participant in this process in all the time that I've been honored to serve with him.
00:27And I thank him for bringing us together this evening.
00:31Mr. President, last Friday I was in Chicago for the formal ceremonial investiture of a new federal district court judge named April Perry.
00:44April Perry has an interesting story that brought her to the bench.
00:48The story starts with her nomination to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
00:55That includes the city of Chicago.
00:57And she was extremely well qualified for that position and went through the Judiciary Committee at the time I was chairing it and went through without a hitch.
01:09She was approved and on the list of U.S. Attorneys.
01:13Now historically, U.S. Attorneys were chosen by voice vote.
01:19When President Trump was in his first term in office, I believe he had around 90 U.S. Attorneys spread all across the United States.
01:27And all but one perhaps, I'm trying to make sure I'm accurate here, all but one was approved by voice vote.
01:37Now look what happens.
01:39To bring U.S. Attorney before us is a much different process today.
01:43What happened?
01:45The Democrats gave President Trump all of his U.S. Attorney nominees in his first term, with perhaps one exception, by voice vote.
01:54Now it goes through an elaborate, time-consuming process.
01:57What happened?
01:58The Vice President of the United States happened.
02:01Vice President J.D. Vance of the State of Ohio decided to come to the floor during the Biden Administration after we had approved 63 U.S. Attorneys and to object to a voice vote.
02:16No, he said we're going to go through the regular process.
02:19I don't like the way the Department of Justice has treated former President at the time, Donald Trump.
02:25And so we're going to insist that you dot all the I's and cross all the T's and go through the process and take several days on each one of the U.S. Attorney nominees.
02:36He made that decision after 63 had been approved under Biden.
02:40And he made it when April Perry was pending.
02:43This was her chance.
02:44The Northern District of Illinois.
02:46And J.D. Vance said no, not the ordinary process.
02:50Not a voice vote.
02:51We're going to take our time.
02:53And he applied the standard not just to my U.S. Attorney in Illinois, but to his own U.S. Attorney in Cleveland, Ohio.
03:02He was resolute.
03:03We're going to stop the way this has been done in the past.
03:06That was literally the end of consideration of U.S. Attorneys under Joe Biden.
03:11If that was his goal, J.D. Vance's goal, our Vice President's goal, he achieved it.
03:16So what happened next to April Perry?
03:19A wonderfully qualified nominee ready for U.S. Attorney.
03:22Well, we sat down and decided that we didn't want to waste that talent.
03:26And I went to her and said, would you consider the vacancy for the U.S. District Court that is open now?
03:34You've gone through the vetting.
03:36They've gone through the background checks.
03:38The FBI's asked all the hard questions.
03:40They've interviewed all the attorneys you worked with.
03:42And everybody finds you acceptable.
03:44Would you consider the federal bench?
03:46And she said yes.
03:47And she was approved.
03:49And we had her formal vestiture this last Friday.
03:54Those are happy occasions.
03:56And there aren't many of them, I'm sure, in the federal courthouse, at least not of this caliber.
04:02And District Court Judge Virginia Kendall, who is a presiding judge over the Northern District, called together her colleagues to witness this investiture.
04:15This happy day for new Judge April Perry.
04:19She brought in about 30 federal district court judges from the Northern District and a number from the 9th District or 7th District of the Appellate Court.
04:32And it dawned on me as I attended this ceremony for April Perry that this has turned out to be an important part of my Senate career.
04:43If you had asked me when I ran for the Senate, what about the appointment of judges, I'd say, well, that's fairly routine.
04:50Turns out it's not.
04:51It's more than routine.
04:52It's one of the more important things you do.
04:55Because the men and women chosen to serve in the federal court system, Article III judges, are appointed for life.
05:04For life.
05:05To remove them, you have to go through an impeachment through Congress to remove a federal court judge.
05:12That's how important it is.
05:13That's how permanent it is, the permanent nature of it.
05:17And that's why each selection makes a difference.
05:20I looked at the 30 or so judges who gathered and realized that I had had a hand in appointing every single one of them.
05:27And many others, too.
05:29And so you go through that process a number of times and you learn.
05:34I look back now on all of the district court judges that I've had a hand in choosing.
05:40And I will tell you, for two or three, it was a mistake.
05:44If I had it to do over again, I would have asked more questions and I would have had more information on those who were chosen.
05:53But that's over a span of 29 years.
05:56Three.
05:57Two or three.
05:58Those who were approved, dozens of others, have really done well.
06:03And they've been praised for the job that they did.
06:07So when I was chairman of this committee, fortunate to have that opportunity, we approved in a four-year period of time a record number of federal court judges, 235.
06:19President Trump in his first term had done 234.
06:22We passed him by one court judge.
06:26And I'm proud of that because it was a lot of hard work.
06:29We had, in order to report a judge out of the Judiciary Committee, every single Democrat had to be in their seats for every minute of the vote.
06:39There was no proxy.
06:40You had to be there.
06:42And they showed up.
06:43And Senator Blumenthal was one of those.
06:46Senator Welsh has joined us now in the Judiciary Committee.
06:50And I salute them.
06:52But now, under the second term of President Trump, the rules are changing.
06:59They weren't very good the first round.
07:02And they're worse now.
07:04The first Trump administration put forward some of the most extreme judicial nominees ever considered by the Senate.
07:12Several Trump nominees had little or no experience in a courtroom.
07:17No litigation experience.
07:19Would you hire a lawyer to take your case to trial if they had never been in a trial in their lives?
07:25Three district court nominees, Catherine Mizell, Justin Walker, and Sarah Pitlick, won unanimous support from committee Republicans, despite having never tried a case.
07:39Imagine you're going in a courtroom.
07:41You're presiding over a trial.
07:42You've never seen one.
07:43You've never been in one.
07:44You may have seen something on television.
07:46You keep looking for Perry Mason and wondering what's next.
07:50That, unfortunately, was a reality with many of these nominees in Trump's first term.
07:55And many Trump nominees took some unusual, if not controversial, if not just plain wrong decisions.
08:02Lawrence Van Dyke, Ninth Circuit nominee, we asked him to affirm that he would be fair, that he would be fair to LGBTQ individuals.
08:15He wouldn't say it.
08:16Just couldn't get the words out of his mouth.
08:18Michael Truncail, an Eastern District nominee, said of President Obama, he was, quote, an un-American imposter.
08:28Those are the words of this man seeking the federal bench about the former president.
08:33He said he would, quote, bow to Arab sheiks and other world leaders.
08:38Where did you find that nominee?
08:41The first Trump administration put forward, get this now, ten judicial nominees who the American Bar Association found to be not qualified to serve on the federal bench.
08:52Ten of them.
08:53Well, what's the American Bar Association got to do with this?
08:57Historically, the American Bar Association did its own background check on nominees for the federal bench.
09:04Where would they go?
09:05Well, they would go in the community.
09:08They would go to the judges that this person has appeared before.
09:11They would go to the fellow attorneys.
09:13They would try to find character references.
09:15And they would dig deep.
09:17And they had some basic rules.
09:18You had to have ten years of experience as an attorney to even be considered for the federal bench.
09:24And then they rated people qualified, not qualified, well qualified, and such.
09:29Over the strong objections of Senate Democrats,
09:32eight of the unqualified nominees proposed by President Trump in his first term were confirmed by Senate Republicans.
09:40So even when the American Bar Association says you're unqualified to serve on the bench,
09:45it didn't discourage the loyalists supporting President Trump.
09:49Incidentally, under the Biden administration, 235 federal judges, how many of them, Durbin, give us the truth here, how many of them were found unqualified?
10:02None.
10:03Every one of the 235 were found qualified by the American Bar Association.
10:08As the former chairman of the committee said, elections have consequences and I get it.
10:14So I understand that the second Trump administration is going to offer nominees closer to him in political philosophy.
10:21But President Trump seems intent on outdoing himself by putting forth nominees who are extreme, partisan, and fundamentally unqualified.
10:30Instead of finding more qualified judicial nominees, Attorney General Bondi ordered the Justice Department to stop cooperating with the American Bar Association and rating nominees.
10:41She didn't want to run into the embarrassment that they did in the first Trump term with 10 of them being found unqualified.
10:48So she said the way to solve that problem is not to find a better nominee, it's to get rid of the American Bar Association.
10:55If they're not going to give a grade to these nominees, we don't have to worry about their being unqualified.
11:01She overturned a practice that had been in place for nearly 70 years, going back to a fellow named Dwight David Eisenhower.
11:09Both Republican and Democratic presidents had followed the rule.
11:13Now the only qualification that President Trump looks for in his judicial nominees, and he says as much, is loyalty.
11:20Show me loyalty or get the heck off the bench.
11:23Look no further than Emil Bovey's nomination to the Third Circuit.
11:28As a senior official in the Justice Department, Mr. Bovey has done nothing but cater to President Trump's every whim.
11:34It's no surprise that President Trump said he had nominated Mr. Bovey because he would, quote,
11:40do anything that is necessary to make America great again.
11:45For life.
11:48Judge for life.
11:50Show me loyalty.
11:51And you got a position for life.
11:53Mr. Bovey personally ordered the termination of federal prosecutors who put violent January 6 rioters in prison.
12:00Understand what happened here.
12:02Men and women, professional attorneys working for the Department of Justice were given assignments.
12:09We have a case we want you to pursue and prosecute.
12:12It's this individual.
12:14Here's the FBI background file.
12:16Go to work.
12:17Turns out these people are the ones that stormed through that door and went rifled through our desk
12:22and aped for photographs sitting in your chair, Mr. President, on January 6th.
12:28As a result of their entering this building, five Capitol policemen died and 140 were assaulted.
12:35Should they have been prosecuted?
12:37You bet.
12:38Beat up on a cop, you should face the consequences.
12:41They did it on January 6th in the name of stopping the election the American people had been involved in just weeks before.
12:48I was here sitting in this chair as the head of the Capitol Police stood where you're sitting, Mr. President,
12:55and told us all stay calm, stay in your chairs, we're going to stay in this room, this is a safe room, and just stay in your seats.
13:04They grabbed the Vice President Pence, took him right out that door, and spirited him off somewhere, but they left us here.
13:12Ten minutes later, the same policeman stood up and said, new announcement, leave as quickly as possible.
13:18We can't keep this room secure.
13:20The Senate of the United States of America, the Capitol of the United States of America, was being run over by demonstrators and insurrectionists.
13:28They were beating up on the police, smashing their heads into the wall between doorlands, and they were ultimately prosecuted for it.
13:35And the prosecutors, the assistant US attorneys who were doing this job, were treated in what way by President Trump when he got back in office?
13:45They were treated like they were the ones who broke the law.
13:48The prosecutors were accused of wrongdoing.
13:51Well, that unfortunately is, in the words of Mr. Bovey, a grave national injustice.
14:01He thinks it is to prosecute these demonstrators.
14:05He's wrong.
14:06What was a grave injustice is what happened to the police on that day.
14:10When asked to justify his actions in firing his US attorneys who prosecuted these insurrectionists,
14:16Mr. Bovey claimed heavy-handed tactics by prosecutors were equally unacceptable as physical violence against law enforcement.
14:26That is an outrageous and offensive statement by a man who wants to be a federal judge for life at the second highest court in the land.
14:34Since January 7th, 2021, there's been an effort by a mega faithful to rewrite the history of January 6th.
14:41But I witnessed it, and many others did as well.
14:44The truth is this.
14:45The United States Capitol was violently attacked by insurrectionists intent on overturning the 2020 election results.
14:52The truth is this.
14:54Five police officers died and more than 140 were injured, protecting this building, staff, the visitors, and members of Congress.
15:02Mr. Bovey also led the Justice Department's efforts to strike a corrupt bargain with New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
15:10This is an outrage, what he did.
15:13Mr. Bovey stated that the charges would be dropped against Mayor Adams without prejudice so that Adams could, quote,
15:20devote full attention and resources to illegal immigration and violent crime.
15:25In other words, President Trump needed Mayor Adams to do his bidding on his deportation policy.
15:32In response, two staunch conservatives resigned from the Justice Department.
15:37A Trump-appointed interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and lead prosecutor Hagan Scott.
15:44Mr. Scott wrote to Mr. Bovey and quote, a quote that will be famous for a long, long time.
15:51He said it, Senator Blumenthal repeated it, I want to say it as well.
15:55Mr. Scott wrote to Mr. Bovey, who wants this lifetime appointment to the bench, and said,
16:02I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion,
16:09but it was never going to be me.
16:12I don't know Mr. Scott, but I will tell you his words are persuasive and compelling.
16:19If that wasn't enough, Mr. Bovey has shown utter disdain for our courts.
16:24A whistleblower stepped forward, gave his name, risked his future,
16:30to tell us what Mr. Bovey had told to the attorneys working on the case against the insurrectionists.
16:38According to this credible whistleblower, who provided ample documentation to back up his claims,
16:46Mr. Bovey told the Department of Justice attorneys that they might need to say, quote, F you,
16:52to federal courts that issue orders this administration doesn't agree with.
16:56Mr. President, that is the most dangerous comment that a person in the position of authority can make in the executive branch,
17:03that they will ignore the court orders that are issued against them.
17:08Yesterday the Senate confirmed Joshua Devine to the federal bench, 34 years old,
17:13received his law degree nine years ago, litigated for five years,
17:18and beyond his troubling lack of experience, he's taken some extreme positions.
17:23He calls himself a zealot.
17:26He calls himself a zealot when it comes to anti-choice.
17:30This zealot has been on full display in his role as Missouri Solicitor General.
17:35He has challenged women's ability in his state to access the abortion drug mifepersonum,
17:42and has undermined the decision of Missouri voters to codify abortion access in their state constitution.
17:49Also deeply troubling, Mr. Devine argued in favor of literacy tests at the ballot box,
17:54stating that people who, quote, aren't informed about issues or platforms have no business voting.
18:01Where does that come from?
18:03In America, literacy tests, where does that come from?
18:07It comes from the era of Jim Crow.
18:10After the Civil War, when African Americans were given citizenship and an opportunity to vote,
18:16they were intimidated in many states when they tried to.
18:19They had to answer questions.
18:21How many bubbles in a bar of soap?
18:23What do letters of mark and reprisal mean in the Constitution?
18:27Impossible questions for anyone, including the lawyers and members of Congress.
18:31And yet, off they went.
18:33Why did they do it?
18:34To discriminate against black voters.
18:37Well, it turns out, Mr. Devine believes that literacy tests should be restored.
18:44It shouldn't be controversial for anyone to say that nominee has disqualified himself.
18:49The fact that the body confirmed Mr. Devine is outrageous.
18:54These nominees are just the tip of the iceberg.
18:57President Trump is going to continue to nominate extreme, equality, qualified individuals,
19:02unless the Senate takes a stand.
19:04If a few of the Senators, and I'm not going to name names,
19:07who've made statements about principles and values,
19:11will stand by their own words when it comes to the orders of the Court,
19:16then they'll join us on a bipartisan basis stopping some of these clearly unqualified individuals.
19:21I urge my colleagues, vote against Mr. Beauvais and all future nominees
19:26whose only loyalty is to the President and not to the Constitution.
19:29I yield the floor.