May 2, 2005
SPEAKERS: BRIAN MCCABE, PRESIDENT OF PROGRESS FOR AMERICA
BENJAMIN GINSBERG,
CHIEF COUNSEL FOR BUSH-CHENEY 2004 AND PFA ADVISER
WENDY LONG,
LEGAL COUNSEL TO THE JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION NETWORK
C. BOYDEN GRAY, CHAIR,
COMMITTEE FOR JUSTICE
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE STEVE KING (R-IA)
MCCABE: Good morning. My name is Brian McCabe, and I'm president of Progress for America.
This morning we are here to launch a $3.3 million advertising and grassroots campaign to ensure that President Bush's slate of well- qualified judges receive an up-or-down vote in the floor of the United States Senate.
Our campaign launches today at a new Web site: www.upordownvote.com. We will launch the site with 25 million banner impressions, with banner advertising in six target states, as well as 15 national media outlets.
We also start on Wednesday an e-mail campaign, where we will send the ad to 10.2 million people.
The centerpiece of our campaign, which launches this afternoon, is an advertising campaign on TV. It is a 60-second bio spot, which features Priscilla Owen, as well as Janice Rogers Brown. The ad is in six target states, as well as a 60-second radio campaign in the same states.
The states are Alaska, Arkansas, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, as well as Rhode Island. And in those states we have targeted five Republicans, as well as five Democrats.
We feel that it is essential that our side of the debate be heard. There has been a lot of discussion on the other side, and we feel it's important to get out some biographical information about these people.
During the last couple weeks there's been a lot of debate about process, and we have not seen a lot discussed actually about the nominees. And our effort today is to try to personalize the campaign.
Some of these nominees have waited four years just for an up-or- down vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
The second part of our campaign will launch next Monday with a national TV advertising buy, which will supplement the state radio, as well as cable and TV buy.
In addition to our paid media effort, we have P.R. professionals, as well as grassroots operatives on the ground in 15 states, and their job is also to continue to spread the word that these nominees deserve an up-or-down in the floor of the United States Senate.
The message in our ads is quite simple: If you think judges should be fair and well qualified, you need to check out these nominees.
Janice Rogers Brown is the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper. She put herself through college and serves on the California state supreme court.
Priscilla Owen serves on the Texas supreme court, has twice been selected to serve on that court. She has received the ABA's highest rating.
As I said, President Bush nominated many of these judges four years ago. It is like going to a job interview, only to wait and wait and wait to hear how you did. These people deserve a fair vote, up or down, on the floor of the United States Senate.
Our (inaudible) with a simple line: The job of a U.S. senator is to vote. Urge you senators to vote, up or down.
We will have four speakers this morning, and then we will show the ad.
The first will be C. Boyden Gray. Boyden chairs the Committee for Justice. He served as counsel to President Bush during his time as vice president and president. He also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.
Next will be Wendy Long. She is the chief legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, and also clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Thomas during the '97-'98 judicial term.
Next will be Representative King from Iowa's 5th district. He serves on the Judiciary Committee and also co-chairs an ad hoc committee -- an ad hoc (inaudible) working group in the House.
And last but not least will be Ben Ginsberg, who served as counsel to President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, as well as serves an adviser to PFA.
Boyden?
GRAY: Thank you.
I want to try to make three points, to put a little background context for this series of events that are going to unfold.
GRAY: First, the main point is to restore the rules that have applied for over 200 years to judicial nominees -- which is they get an up or down vote.
There's this talk of the so-called constitutional option, or the Byrd option, or the nuclear option -- and so the Republicans are changing something.
All the Republicans are trying to do is restore what has existed up until about two years ago.
The best way I can make this point is to say that, if the Democrats had really wanted to stop Justice Clarence Thomas, they could have simply said, "We want" -- as they're now saying -- "60 votes for his confirmation."
We never had 60 votes. And that would have been a far more dignified way to deal with his nomination than what happened.
But they didn't try -- it never occurred to anybody. It just didn't exist.
The second point I want to make is that, in some ways, the Democrats have now more or less conceded it by saying, "Well, the Republicans bottled up a lot of Clinton's nominees in committee" -- some 60 they say -- "and that's the equivalent of a filibuster.
Well, it's not.
And there have been skirmishes in committee, especially in the last year before your term, that have occurred over the last 30 to 40 years, and I think it's a relative point here that there were as many nominees bottled up in this fashion in one term of President Bush, 41, as there were in two terms of Clinton.
And perhaps, more importantly, the net figure of importance to the system, to the judicial system, that will more beg to be left unfilled at the end of Bush, 41, than there were at the end of Clinton.
The following point I want to make has to do with the nominees that are up there. The leading academic consultant to the Democratic party, to the Democratic senators, is a Chicago law professor named Cass Sunstein, who has done a very intensive survey of nominations over the last 50 years.
He wrote an op/ed about this in the Washington Post last October where he, among other things, found that there is, quote, "An extraordinary consistency" -- those are his words -- "extraordinary consistency between the nominees made by Reagan, Bush I and the current president."
So what this president is doing is not naming right-wing extremists that are somehow off the mark of what has happened over the last quarter century.
No. They're right in the mainstream. And his predecessors have been able to get the same kind of judge through what has often been a Democratic Senate.
I think you will find, when you look at the ad that's going to be run, that these are mainstream judges. As has been pointed out, Janice Rogers Brown, the biggest vote-getter on the California Supreme Court -- that is not a conservative court and that is not a conservative state.
Wendy?
LONG: Thanks. The Judicial Confirmation Network wants to thank Progress for America for this ad campaign, which will focus attention on who this minority of senators is obstructing from appointment.
These two women are among President Bush's most highly qualified nominees to our federal circuit courts of appeal. They are hard working women of great integrity, who have risen to the top of the legal profession and dedicated their lives to public service.
They're intellectual leaders on two of our nation's largest state supreme courts, Texas and California. And they're really the epitome of what a judge is supposed to be: a neutral umpire who takes a set of rules that she didn't write and can't change and applies it impartially to the parties and the facts before her.
The Judicial Confirmation Network is going to assist Progress for America in getting broad distribution of this ad by, first of all, sending it by e-mail directly to 675,000 interested citizens who care about this issue.
We're also providing it to our more than 70 coalition partner organizations, to distribute to their respective memberships.
LONG: And, overall, the reach of that effort will be approximately 10 million citizens -- again, who care about this issue and who are interested, both in the appointment of highly qualified judges and justices, and in having a fair process in the Senate, where they'll receive an up-or-down vote.
The other thing the Judicial Confirmation Network is doing is organizing grassroots citizen efforts in key states. And right now we're already up and running in six states, those being Arkansas, Maine, Nebraska, Florida, Colorado and Indiana. And there will be more.
Our principal focus has been on those red states that have blue senators. And we'll continue to do this. We know it's effective. We know that citizens care about senators obstructing highly qualified judges from being appointed. We know that, for example, from the experience of senator Tom Daschle, who was the obstructionist in chief in the last Congress.
Thanks.
KING: Thank you, Wendy.
I'm Steve King, Iowa's 5th congressional district. I serve on the House Judiciary Committee on the Subcommittee for the Constitution, and also on the House Working Group for Judicial Accountability.
I would point out that Iowa is one of those red states with a blue senator as well, and I'm sending a message to Senator Harkin, along with the rest of those senators, and that being that the United States of America, these judicial appointees, my constituents, all of us have a vested interest in an up-or-down vote.
And, furthermore, it isn't just a matter of fairness or just a matter of justice. It is a matter that this is unprecedented, to have judges who have been appointed by a president, generally for the full first term of his presidency, almost four years some of them have hung on the vine, with a majority of votes there on the floor of the Senate, but blocked up because of an unprecedented use of a term that's used in the Senate, a Senate rule that's not in our constitution, the filibuster.
And I don't object to the filibuster when it comes to holding up legislation. That's the Senate rules. But when it violates the Constitution, I do object.
They deserve an up-or-down vote because the Constitution calls for the advice and consent of the Senate. Consent has always been defined as a simple majority. And in fact in the Constitution every exception to a simple majority is clearly spelled out within the Constitution. Confirmation of judges is not one of them. No one's making that argument.
I heard Governor Cuomo say the other day in his objection to this effort to provide an up-or-down vote for these judges that James Madison wrote that the Constitution was there to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
Well, that is not what's going on in the United States Senate today. I really think he informed of that.
KING: This is the tyranny of the minority against the will of the majority and the expressed direction of the Constitution.
So, if we're going to move forward with this country, we cannot let Teddy Kennedy and Chuck Schumer name these judges. We must give them an up or down vote.
The people went to the polls and elected their senators. They deserved a vote from the senators that they elected to determine the direction of this country -- and we all know that the last bastion of activism is in our courts. We need judges that understand the Constitution and the rule of law. That's their job.
Thank you.
GINSBERG: Thank you, Congressman.
On behalf of PFA, it is an honor to be here as part of an increasingly unified effort to bring a fair up or down vote to the Congress.
And when you cut to the chase of what we're seeing here, it is about a minority preventing nominees who have majority support in the Senate from receiving a fair up or down vote.
But much more than process, what PFA is struck by is the Democrats' denial of that simple, essential, fair up or down vote. And what that up or down vote hinges on is people.
And what you'll see in the PFA ad is a description of two of the judges who are really representative of the overall qualified judicial nominees that the president has sent up to the Senate.
It's also important to realize that, amidst all the rhetoric that we're hearing on the debate and the torrent of words about precedents in the Senate, is that, at the core, this is a matter about a president -- any president's -- nominees deserving a simple up or down vote when they have majority support in the chamber, as has been evidenced in the cloture votes that have already taken place.
As I said, PFA ads highlight two of those individuals, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. And a core element in the Democrats' rhetoric in denying the up or down vote to these two nominees is that they are somehow too extreme or out of the mainstream.
But facts are pesky things.
And one of the essential facts is that, on the one hand, you have the Democrats' rhetoric about being out of the mainstream.
On the other hand, you have the votes of the people of California and Texas, who know these justices and their work the best. And those votes debunk the credibility of the Democrats' rhetoric.
The next time that you hear the Democrats say that Priscilla Owen is out of the mainstream, you need to remember that the people of Texas have elected her twice to the Texas Supreme Court, first in 1994 and secondly in 2000, where she received 84.2 percent of the vote.
In doing that, she also won the endorsements of the major newspapers of the state, who have not always been so kind to candidates of the conservative side of the equation.
Similarly, the next time you hear the Democrats say that Janice Rogers Brown is outside of the mainstream, listen to what the people of California said, as Boyden noted.
But the facts are, in 1998, in addition to winning broad editorial support from not conservative-friendly newspapers in that state, she won 75.91 percent of approval -- higher than any of the other three justices she was running with on that ballot.
GINSBERG: So that's the bottom line. The Democrats are denying fair and well-qualified judicial nominees, as exemplified by Justices Owen and Brown, an up-or-down vote. Both have been overwhelming approved by the voters of their states -- the people who know them the best.
That's not right, it's not fair, and we hope that the up-or-down vote, that is within the traditions of the United States Senate, will take place in the very near future.
With that, we'd like to show you the ads and then take your questions.
So if we could see the ads please.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: If you think judges should be fair and well- qualified, look at these women. Janice Brown is the daughter of sharecroppers. She put herself through school and rose to become the first African-American woman on the California Supreme Court.
Brown has won praise from Republicans and Democrats for being fair and honest. Other judges call Janice Brown superb and extremely intelligent.
Priscilla Owen was twice selected to serve on the Texas Supreme Court. Endorsed by major newspapers, Owen got strong bipartisan support and the ABA's highest rating.
President Bush nominated them and many others to be federal judges, some as long as four years ago. But Senate Democrats have abused the rules and refuse to even allow a vote. So courtrooms sit empty while thousands of Americans have their cases delayed.
The job of a U.S. senator is to vote. Urge your senators to vote, up or down. Enough is enough.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GINSBERG: With that, we'd be happy to take your questions.
QUESTION: The fact that you're focusing on these two women in your ads, should we read in that that these are the two judges (inaudible) Senator Frist will bring up first?
GINSBERG: Well, I think all the judges that are up are well qualified, and we endorse them all.
I think it is they who exemplify much of the characteristics and qualities in the judicial nominees.
QUESTION: So do you hope Senator Frist brings them up first?
GINSBERG: Well, Senator Frist will be able to make that decision within the confines of the Senate, but they and any of the others would be excellent to bring up first.
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)
GINSBERG: Well, as I said, they exemplify the qualities of all the nominees who are up. Frankly, we could have picked, I think, other two. But those were the ones that we chose because they seemed to be sort of most representative of the quality of the nominees.
QUESTION: Is there a strategy here to try to target the states where there are senators who are undecided on the question of supporting (inaudible)? You've targeted Rhode Island and Nebraska and Maine, where there are (inaudible) Republicans who are on the fence (inaudible)?
GINSBERG: Well, there are five Democrats and five Republican senators in those states, and obviously part of what I think Progress for America wants to accomplish with its up-or-down vote campaign is to talk to the people of the states of the individual senators who will be most impacted. And those are pretty good states because they do provide a broad cross-section of a range of senators who conceivably will decide this vote.
But of course there is also a national campaign that will start the following week. And so there's a recognition that this is an issue that is fought out both in sort of the nationwide perceptions of the issues, as well as the individual votes of individual senators in the chamber.
QUESTION: Two questions. One, I'd like to the members who'd like to to explain why the Fortas situation is not a precedent for a judicial filibuster, one.
QUESTION: Two, do you assume that any Republican who, if required to, voted for the quote/unquote "nuclear option" would also automatically support any of the underlying judges? Could a Republican vote for the nuclear option but withhold the option of not voting on confirmation for the underlying justice?
And if so, would that be in retribution or as some sort of political cost within the deal?
GINSBERG: Yes, let me answer the second part first and then turn it over to Boyden for the first part.
I think senators obviously vote the way senators believe they should vote. But certainly, what this ad points out is that there is an essential element of unfairness in denying well-qualified nominees, with the majority support of the chamber, that up or down vote.
Now, we would suspect that, once the quality -- once those nominees actually come to the floor, the fact that they have already received the majority of senators' support in the cloture petitions of last year, would mean that they are nominated. And we think the quality of giving an up or down vote will speak for itself.
GRAY: In the case of Fortas, a few points. Normally, a filibuster campaign, as we have seen with the judges so far in the last two years or so -- I think there were five or six cloture votes over six or seven months -- that's what a filibuster is. It is this extended debate.
With the case of Fortas, he was on the floor only five days. There was a cloture vote, which I think was really more in the nature of the test vote. He couldn't even -- I think he got 47 votes. Couldn't even get 50 for that -- on that day.
Later that day, he asked Johnson to withdraw his name. And within six months, he had left the court, really in disgrace.
Many of the ethical issues that had later forced him off the court were already surfacing at this time. And he was, as I say, on the floor only five days.
I think the Republicans would gladly -- as Senator Frist has offered -- would gladly give five days of debate, would gladly give 100 hours of debate. That's not really an issue.
As I said earlier, I think before you came in, if there had been any historical practice, that would have been what the Democrats would have done -- it seems to me or us -- to deal with both the Bork confirmation and the Thomas confirmation.
For Justice Thomas, I was involved. We never had 60 votes. The Democrats could have said, "It's historical precedent. You've got to have 60 votes."
I'm not sure we would have nominated him. But he certainly wouldn't have been confirmed.
All of our judges who've been -- all of the president's nominees -- have always gotten more than 50 votes on their cloture vote.
I think it's important to add that, at the time of the Fortas nomination -- and this may be why the Democrats didn't want to -- why President Johnson didn't want to -- do anything further than pull the name, because he wasn't going to get confirmed, there was a letter to the Senate committee that said:
"Whatever the merits of filibustering legislation, it has no place for judicial nominees. To filibuster or to block by 60 votes a judicial nominee would strike at the very heart of our constitutional system."
That letter, which has not gotten any publicity, was signed by the deans of every major law school in America, every past president of the ABA, and practically every major practitioner in the country.
I think that was the sentiment then. It should be the sentiment today.
It just never happened. And this is why it's so important to restore the practice that existed up until the 10 judges were filibustered, that included Brown and Owen.
LONG: Excuse me, I just had one more thing about Fortas, which is that that situation differs fundamentally, because what you had there was bipartisan opposition. There was no clear majority support. He was on the floor for four or five days.
Here we have an announced entirely partisan effort in advance -- not to string out debate, not to get more time, but an announced effort to permanently block from the bench these judges.
LONG: It's just fundamentally different in that way.
QUESTION: A question to Mr. Ginsberg and Congressman King. How seriously do you take the threat by some Democrats to maybe shut down the work of the Senate should the so-called nuclear option be implemented?
GINSBERG: The question was: How seriously do we take the threat to shut down the Senate?
KING: Well, only they can know how sincere they are about this. But I take the position that, first of all, the Constitution should prevail over Senate rules.
The position that they've taken is to contravene the Constitution. We cannot let them hold this Constitution hostage for their version of judicial appointments.
If they should shut down the Senate, then there are many things hanging out there in the balance, including energy, transportation, a number of other important pieces of legislation.
Hopefully, this gets done in the month of May, before we have a retirement of a Supreme Court justice that we anticipate.
If they should shut down the Senate, that shuts down our government. If they do that, the people who have done that in the past have paid a political price for it.
But my view is this, that if it's going to happen, then let's get to it and let's get it over with so we can rebuild and get on with the business of this country.
We've got to get over this hump if we're going to have an effective judicial system. And if they're going to hold the legislation hostage at the same time, that's going to be on their heads and on their hands. But we'll work together afterwards to rebuild this country.
GINSBERG: So far, the Democrats' agenda has been to -- this far in this Congress since they lost the 2004 election -- to fundamentally oppose everything.
That is not traditionally a party position that has been rewarded at the polls, if that's their ultimate objective.
And so if they, indeed, become the party of "no," as they have threatened, then I think that that will sort of lay bare the deficit of ideas and new programs that they have.
QUESTION: The way this ad has been laid out, and given viewing habits of kind of halfway watching, do you run the risk of having just these two nominees rise as the ones you endorse, rather than you're trying to get a point across that they all face an up or down vote?
KING: I think you see in the ad a lot of important messages that the nominees should receive an up or down vote. All the nominees are well qualified. Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen are just two representatives of all the nominees.
In addition to the ad, if you go to upordownvote.com, you will see information about all the nominees who are out there.
So this is just representative. We have people on the ground in 15 states who are promoting an up or down vote for each of these nominees.
So the advertising -- you're obviously limited to the 60 seconds. We thought these two nominees are very representative of the rest of the group. And we hope the message -- or the important take-away -- is that all these nominees are well qualified and they deserve an up or down vote.
And in many instances, they have been waiting years just for their vote.
QUESTION: Are you saying (OFF-MIKE)?
MCCABE: We have the six states that -- great question.
We have the six states of: Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico -- I'm sorry, let me give them to you in order.
Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Rhode Island.
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) for your effort -- can you tell us...
MCCABE: If people in these states are out talking to their friends and groups in the states, first educating them about the issue -- that these people deserve an up or down vote -- and then trying to get them to engage in the debate by reaching out to their friends, reaching out to their senators, urging them to support an up or down vote.
QUESTION: Can you tell us anything about your fund-raising for this effort? Did you have specifics on raising campaigns for the judges? And do you have any major donors who are helping you on this campaign?
MCCABE: When Progress for America started off the year, we had a number of issues which we said we would focus on this year: Social Security, judicial nominations, tax and tort reform.
And as we met with potential supporters, we told them we would be engaging in all of them, and it wasn't specific to any one piece of the puzzle. And so we began to travel around and try to raise money to support these issues.
Obviously, we were pretty aggressive on Social Security and we were able to invest some resources in that.
MCCABE: And we've got $3.3 million behind this campaign alone.
QUESTION: So the contributions aren't specifically for the judge campaign? You didn't have anybody saying, "I'm giving you a million dollars to put on ads for judges"?
MCCABE: The fund-raising is to support the issue agenda.
QUESTION: Question for (OFF-MIKE). Some of us have reported, most recently David Brooks wrote this yesterday in the New York Times, about the idea that Reid has offered some of an unofficial pledge not to filibuster as often, only in extraordinary circumstances, to First, and that this would probably apply to a Supreme Court nominee.
Would you guys support any deal? Not support, if Frist were to accept any sort of deal like that, how would conservatives view it?
GRAY: Well, it's inherently unstable, isn't it? I mean, two points. Maybe not a Supreme Court nominee. Well, if you're the president of the United States, maybe, maybe not.
I think that's really too unstable to operate. It leaves up to the Democrats the choice to do any time they want to, and the Republicans are deprived of having a clear -- or the party that holds the White House is deprived of a clear understanding of what the rules are.
The second thing is, how do you choose which of the appellate nominees go through? How do you distinguish? Do you trade them off? Do you say, "All right, we'll take Pryor and maybe Myers," or, "We'll take a little environment here, but we'll take back a little abortion here," or, "We'll give you prayer in the schools, but not the Pledge of Allegiance," or, "We'll give you the Ten Commandments, but not school choice"? I mean, how do you make those.
The point about filibustering legislation is, it's a way of forcing debate and maybe amendment. But how to you amend a nominee? You can't amend a nominee. It just doesn't have any place.
And how do you pick between the nominees. These two that you've seen are ones I think the Democrats, as I understand it, from what I understand about the Reid proposal, is they would not get through. Well, on what basis? And how do you explain it? I defy anyone to explain why you would block those two and not some others.
So it's very fortuitous that this ad -- which I think was created before this proposal leaked out in the newspapers -- deals with these two fine women, because it shows the total arbitrary nature of (inaudible). How do you do it? And it's very unstable and very unprincipled.
LONG: I think that Senator Frist has made clear this is an issue of principle. And I think what that means is that he's not willing to throw overboard even one of these nominees, which is exactly the right position.
The Constitution allows the president to appoint each and every federal court nominee, and it gives the Senate the obligation to say yes or no to each person that the present nominates.
And so to even violate that in one case would be to circumvent the Constitution and to undermine our representative democracy.
QUESTION: Are we to infer, the fact that you're targeting states with some undecided senators that you collectively believe that Senator Frist may not have the votes to prevail on the nuclear option?
GINSBERG: No, I would not make that assumption. We think that he does. But in the course of informing people about the parameters of this debate, the vote is never over until the vote is taken.
But, no, I think he does have majority support...
(CROSSTALK)
GINSBERG: Well, part of what's important about this whole expenditure of money and about the whole debate is the principle involved.
And here's why this has long-term ramifications. Notice the way the notion of principle has changed. At the start of this debate the Republicans in the Senate said the principle is these nominees deserve an up-or-down vote. The Democrats said, "We're not going to give an up-or-down vote because they're outside the mainstream of justices."
Now it has evolved so that Senator First has proposed a compromise in which all the nominees still get an up or down vote, and the Democrats have said, "Well, we're really principled, except we think maybe four of the seven or five of the seven are OK to get through in the course of this compromise."
And so pointing out the difference in what principle means to the two parties is something that should be trumpeted long and loud to the American public and why Progress for America is proud to launch this up-and-down vote campaign.
QUESTION: Correct me if I'm wrong, but is one of the goals of your ad campaign to try to shift some of the numbers in some of the polls we've seen, such as the poll by the Wall Street Journal, poll by The Washington Post last week, even an internal poll by the Republican Party that showed less than broad support, if not opposition to changing the rules?
GINSBERG: Well, I think that really very much depends on which poll you believe. If you ask the question, "Do nominees deserve an up-or-down vote?" an overwhelming number says yes.
In fact, Progress for America is a group that talks about the issues of public importance to the country, and this is certainly an issue of public importance to the country and in shaping the parameters of the debate. That's the reasons for putting up this ad.
QUESTION: Just to follow up on that, do you feel your comments have gotten a bit of a head start in the public relations war here?
GINSBERG: I think they may have a more sympathetic megaphone to talk through perhaps.
But, no, I think that if you look at where the country is, it is largely forming its opinions still on how this debate should be conducted.
MCCABE: There's additional information in the packets that everyone was given. Thank you.
KING: I want to make one more point quickly. And that is that, as a conservative -- the question was asked, "How do conservatives react?" -- I actually want this to happen, I actually want to see the president of the Senate vote to break the tie, if that's what it takes. I actually want to see them put away this idea that they can contravene the Constitution and the minority can hold up judges.
If not, if there's a compromise or if we recede from this and don't settle this question today, it'll be back again tomorrow or next year or next generation.
So that's my view. And let's get it done and move on, they deserve an up-or-down vote.
Thanks.
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