Friday, May 20, 2005

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Floor Statement on Judicial Nominations
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor

Mr. President, I rise this morning to continue the debate with regard to the confirmation or advice and consent on the approval or denial of judges nominated by the President of the United States.

I’ve listened to most of the debate and have participated in some of it, and I found something to be very interesting: we haven’t talked much about whether or not these seven, upon which a filibuster has been threatened, are qualified or not. We instead have argued as to whether something that was never used for 214 years is or isn’t a tradition. So I thought this morning I’d like to talk about one of these seven.

We obviously are debating Priscilla Owen from the President’s home state of Texas. But I want to direct my remarks to Janice Rogers Brown of California, who also has been threatened to be filibustered and not allowed to get a vote up or down. I thought in preparing my remarks that I would research those who don’t think she should get a vote and what they are saying about her record so that I could at least come to the floor and debate what we really should be debating, and that is the qualifications of that judge. I went to a number of web sites, and I found something very common that you usually find in this type of issue. I found a couple of quotes repeated over and over again as exemplary of why Janice Rogers Brown is not in the mainstream. And so what I thought I would do today in my time is take those quotes and the sense from those two speeches that she gave and ask the question: Is she out of the mainstream?

You see, Mr. President, the two quotes that are used so much on the web sites to disparage Justice Brown, are two quotes from two speeches, both of which I’ve read, which I’I find to be quite remarkable. Both made in the year 2000, both fundamentally about the beliefs of Janice Rogers Brown. So I’d like to analyze those two quotes for a second and ask us to ask the question: Is Janice Rogers Brown in the mainstream? Or is she not?

The first quote is from August 12, 2000, in a speech she made entitled “50 Ways to Lose Your Freedom.” I apologize to the Chair: I’m going to read precisely so I don’t miss a word. This is the quote that says she’s not in the mainstream, one of them:

“Some things are apparent,” she says. “When government moves in, communities retreat, civil society has difficulty, our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.”

That’s s strong statement, but it sits there on its own without any thought or context of the speech that was made. Because the speech by Mrs. Brown was her belief in the innate goodness of people and of what she refers to in her speech of natural law, and that is we are born knowing right from wrong and good from evil. And her point here is that when government becomes so big, so intrusive, and so pervasive that it can do all of the things she listed—and those listed are, some people say, that’s not a mainstream segment. So I ask myself, “Let’s look at those things she said could happen as we lose our freedom.”

She said that families are under siege. I think that’s a fair statement in contemporary 21 st century. Divorce continues to be up. Child abuse grows. Obviously that’s been a problem. Talks about war in the streets. We don’t have war in the streets, but we have gangs in the streets. We have crime in our streets. Expropriation of property: look at the assault on private property rights, something we debate in this Senate. The rule of law, where today it seems like in many cases the goal is to avoid the rule rather than follow it. The triumph of deceit, even in corporate America. Look at Worldcom, a statement of deceit to represent a value that did not exist.

A debased culture? Well, I’m a product of the 1950’s and 1940’s and 1960’s, when I grew up, just like Mrs. Brown, I don’t know if this is a good example or not, but you know, in the 1950’s when I was growing up, “Father Knows Best” was the number-one show. Today it is “Desperate Housewives.” I think that tells us something about the direction we may have gone in terms of the value of entertainment. And then let’s talk about virtue for a second and finding it contemptible. We are in a time where Justices have ruled that “Under God” doesn’t belong in the Pledge of Allegiance and obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. Somewhere along the way Janice Brown makes a very good point: when government grows so large that it permeates every facet of society—and there are not restraints upon it—then the natural law of what we know as good and evil, or right and wrong, really loses its momentum.

Justice Brown made another comment in that speech which I found remarkable, because it fundamentally talks about what she believes in terms of democracy and freedom. And I want to quote that:

“Freedom and democracy are not synonymous,” she wrote. “Indeed one of the grave errors of American foreign policy is the assumption that merely installing the forms of a regime like ours without its foundation will automatically lead to freedom, stability, and prosperity.”

Is that out of the mainstream? I don’t think so. Because Janice Rogers Brown was saying you just can’t say you are something unless you have fundamental foundations and values to underpin that. That’s what’s made this democracy of ours so great. That is why our freedom has endured, because we are built on fundamental foundations of right and wrong. Now I, for one, as I consider whether or not I would give advice and consent on a Justice to one of the highest courts in our nation, like somebody who has that fundamental belief in natural law, that fundamental belief in right and wrong, and that fundamental belief that human nature, by human nature, we are good people and that freedom of good people governed by natural law is the greatest freedom there is.

[There is] a second quote that has been used over and over and over again on the websites. And I want to share that quote if I can, Mr. President. It is from another speech she made, although it is in the speech I mentioned on “50 Ways to Lose Your Freedom.” It’s also given and quoted from a speech made in the year 2000 in April to the Federalist Society called “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” That’s the speech title. Here’s the quote:

“My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was a disgrace, a blight on honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their children because they have a right to so much free stuff as a political system will permit them to extract. Big government is the choice of multinational corporations, single moms, for regulated industry, rugged Midwesterners, and even a militant senior citizen.”

That quote is put there to say she is not in the mainstream, without explanation and out of context. I want to analyze it for a second. I’m a little older than Janice Rogers Brown, but we are of the same generation and we are contemporaries. I was born in the early 1940’s, she in the late 1940’s. My grandparents found the government dole contemptible as well, just as hers. My grandparents were sharecroppers, just like hers. In fact, my grandfather, for whom I am named, was a pretty successful (at one time) tobacco warehouseman in Georgia, who lost it all in the Depression and sharecropping. The summers in the 1950s, my mom would send me down there to work on that farm with him. And I heard him say many times he never wanted to have to be on the government dole. That is not out of the mainstream then and it is not out of the mainstream now, because all of us want to find the prosperity of individual initiative and live and work in the country whose system of justice honors the greatest success that any of us can achieve.

She made another good point when she talked about how big government is, in many cases, the choice of multinational corporations and single moms. Taken out of context, somebody might say, “Well, is that in the mainstream?” Well, she is pointing out what you and I see, Mr. President, every day. And that is both single moms and multinational corporations have their own lobbies here to lobby us. In terms of corporations, it may be for tax treatment or regulation. In terms of single moms, it may be for benefits, but the bigger government grows the more pervasive it gets, the more even those lobbies might grow.

And then she says for regulated industries and rugged Midwesterners. Yesterday I had a meeting with an energy company that’s regulated and rugged Midwesterners, including Senators in this body, are out for ethanol benefits all the time. She was pointing out how big government can get and how pervasive it can go and make all of us possibly too dependent on that big government. As far as the statement about senior citizens cannibalizing their children’s future, I understand why somebody might say that’s a strong statement. But Mr. President, the debate of the day outside of this filibuster is about Social Security and the debate to follow that will be about Medicare. And the fact that the two combined, of which I, a senior citizen, will very shortly benefit from, will, if not reformed, cannibalize my grandchildren’s future. Janice Brown is not only not out of the mainstream, somebody might have even called her a prophet in the year 2000 when she made both of these speeches. Because the analogies she drew and the conclusions that she made are now the contemporary issues of the day.

Mr. President, there are some other points that I would like to make quickly before my time expires. I did a radio interview this morning in my home state of Georgia to one of the most listened-to stations in the city of Atlanta. And I was asked by the host, “Mr. Isakson, you were in the minority in the Georgia legislature for years and were the leader for eight. Do you understand Mr. Reid and the minority’s point on the filibuster?”

And my answer was yes, I understand it. When I was in the minority in that role in the legislature, I tried to take every advantage of every rule. But there is a point in time at which you do what's right. And you do what the master rule tells you to do. For us, the master rule is the Constitution of the United States of America. And in Article 2 of that Constitution, it delegates to the President the authority to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court and several courts created there under and it gives the Senate the responsibility to advise and consent. Advice and consent that is not delineated by any way in that sentence or in that document to require anything other than a simple majority. In fact, Mr. President, there’s seven places in the Constitution where it says we have to have a supermajority; impeachment is one, ratifying the Constitution, another. Sometimes it’s two-thirds, sometimes it’s three-fourths in terms of states ratifying—the Constitution is specific. It’s specific on judges that the Senate advise and consent without designation of a supermajority. For the public that listens to all this debate about filibusters and tradition, that really is the issue. The rule of the Senate in invoking cloture that requires 60 votes to bring up a simple majority vote is the application of a rule to supersede the Constitutional dictate that this Senate vote up-or-down on Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen. That is ultimately the issue and it is to me that simple.

Another reason I chose to talk about Janice Rogers this morning is because she’s a daughter of the South, because of the admiration I have for her. She and I grew up in the same South. We grew up in the most significant change that part of the country ever went through. When civil rights changed, beginning with Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, and I went as a student in schools, went through that transition where the schools were integrated. And in college, while I studied political science, the debate in this body and the most famous filibuster of all was about the civil rights laws that were passed in the 1960’s.

Janice Brown was born at a time and in a year where her ascension to the bench on the Supreme Court of California or the federal courts would not have seemed possible because of the rules of the day in the South. But she and I grew through a time where this Congress, in fact, this United States Senate, saw fit to memorialize the civil rights laws in this country and equalize the treatment of every American. That is why I believe Janice Brown deserves a vote up-or-down. I care not — I care but I respect how any member of this body will vote. But voting not to vote, to deny someone the opportunity to which they have been nominated by the President of the United States, elected by a majority of the electors in the last election, is not right. It’s not, as Janice Brown referred to it, the “natural law.” We all know basically the difference in right and wrong, and denying that vote is wrong.

So, my remarks this morning are to say simply this to those who would say that Janice Brown is not in the mainstream. I ask you to do what I’ve done. Read her speeches that are quoted. Read them all. When you go read the speech about “50 Ways to Lose Your Freedom,” don’t read one paragraph out of context, read all 18 pages and read it a second time. Understand that this is a woman who wants everybody to understand that she believes in right and wrong. She believes in the appropriate role of government. She believes in empowerment of the individual, and every thought of all these quotes ends up being based in that very fact, the natural law of the belief of human beings in right and wrong and the empowerment of the individual. I hope Janice Brown is in the mainstream because I believe that’s what the mainstream believes, and those who think it is not have to believe the opposite, which is less power of the individual and shades of gray when it comes to right and wrong. We need on the bench of this country those who see things clearly and speak their mind.

In my meeting with Janice Rogers Brown, I told her I was going to speak on the floor about her because I had been so impressed with her record and because I had gone back and read those speeches. And she told me this at the end of our meeting. She said, “You know, I respect anyone voting either way on me. In fact, in a way I’m glad my speeches are now being read. They should know what I think and they should know what I believe. And I should know how they feel.”

I hope sometime after next Tuesday and after we finally come, hopefully, to a vote on Priscilla Owen, we will come to a vote on Janice Rogers Brown, and we will find another Justice confirmed to another court that believes in the power of the individual and the difference in right and in wrong. And I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.