Remarks at a People for the American Way Reception - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 30, 2000

October 24, 2000

Thank you very much, Ralph. I want to thank you and your predecessor, Carole Shields, and the other board members of the People for the American Way. I thank Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston for joining us tonight. Where are you, Sheila? She's here somewhere--right there. Thank you. And I want to thank Mary Frances Berry. You know, we go back to the Carter administration together. We've been friends for way over 20 years, and now she's the Chair of our U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She's done a magnificent job. [Applause] Thank you.

I smiled when I walked in and put my arm around her. I said, "Mary Frances, that gray hair looks a lot better on you than it does on me." And we concluded that we had both earned every one of ours in the last 8 years, and we're proud to have them. So thank you, Mary Frances Berry. Thank you.

I want to thank you for hosting this event. I thank all of you for participating, because one of the great questions the American people will answer in this election is the future of the Supreme Court, the future of the Federal courts generally, and what the shape of American life will be when it comes to the individual rights of American citizens, and potentially as important, the power of the United States Congress and the Federal Government to protect the American people from all manner of things, in the face of a determined effort by what is already on occasion a majority in the Supreme Court to limit the ability of the Congress to do it.

On a daily basis, Federal judges make decisions that affect our everyday lives. Of course, they can decide at the Supreme Court level whether women continue to have the right to choose or if their fundamental rights to privacy will be eliminated; whether the Government can keep a safe environment for our children; whether we can keep guns out of schools; whether we can pass a law to protect women from violence; whether we can ban hate crimes; and whether we can expect the States to cooperate with the Federal Government and do their part if the Congress finds the national interest, or whether we will have a new form of ultraconservative judicial activism that rejects the Government's rights or authority to protect the rights of our citizens and the interests of our citizens.

For 8 years now, I have worked to ensure that our courts at all levels are filled with judges who are qualified, fair, reflect our Nation's diversity, and uphold and enforce our laws. Since 1993, I've had the honor to appoint more women and minorities to the Federal bench than any previous President, almost half of my judicial appointees. But I'm also gratified to know that they have garnered the highest percentages of top ABA ratings of any group of Presidential appointees in nearly 40 years, which shatters the myth that you can't have diversity and excellence at the same time.

In spite of the fact that study after study after study have shown how qualified these people are, and I might add, how relatively nonideological and mainstream, a number of my appointees, especially in election years, both in 1996 and this year--although in this case, some of these go back the last 3 or 4 years--have been denied a place on the bench and in many cases even denied a hearing for partisan political reasons, even though it's clear that they're qualified. There are more than 40 pending judicial nominees currently. More than half of them are women and minorities. A study not very long ago showed that the women and minorities I appointed had to wait a whole lot longer for a hearing than guys that looked like me, and that they were much more likely to be denied.

For example, even though the fourth circuit in our country, in southeastern United States, has the largest percentage of African-Americans of any Circuit in the United States, no African-American has ever served on it. And there have been plenty of qualified lawyers in the fourth circuit who happen to be African-American. Roger Gregory would be the first African-American. He's not been given a hearing.

In the fifth circuit, which has, next to the ninth circuit, the largest number of Hispanics, Enrique Moreno--graduated with great distinction from Harvard and is a native of El Paso, and the judges in west Texas said he was one of the three best lawyers in west Texas--has been deemed unqualified for the fifth circuit by the Republican Senators. And I might say, the response from the other Republican officials in Texas has been deafening silence.

The longest waiting appellate nominee is Helene White of Michigan, who has been waiting for 3 years now. They include Kathleen McCree Lewis, daughter of the civil rights lion Wade McCree. She'd be the first African-American woman to serve on the sixth circuit. The people who can't get a vote include Bonnie Campbell, former attorney general of Iowa, who led our administration's efforts to pass the Violence Against Women Act.

Time and again I have asked the Senate leadership just to give these folks a vote. But they did it once, when they rejected Ronnie White, the first African-American State supreme court justice in the history of Missouri, who was turned down for a Federal judgeship, though he was superbly qualified, on grossly political grounds. And the reaction of the public in Missouri and throughout the United States was predictable and quite honorable. And so the next strategy was that "People don't like it very much when we vote these folks down, so we'll just let them die in silence. We'll just never have hearings."