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09-02-09 Transcript of Senator Leahy Call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in re:United States Justice Department
It is great to be back at Georgetown. It was at the Law Center in December 2006 that Ifirst outlined the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda for the last Congress. It seemsfitting to return to the University at the start of the 111th Congress to take stock, and tolook forward. I thank Judge Katzmann for the opportunity to present this MarverBernstein Lecture. What an exciting time to be an American, or to be a student, or to be a student at a greatuniversity in America’s capital city – or all three. To those of you inspired by thepresidential election of 2008, I feel a special kinship. It was John Kennedy, another young President almost 50 years ago, who inspired me to public service. I also had theprivilege of meeting his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, when I was a law student at Georgetown. When I spoke two years ago at the Law Center, America was slogging ever deeper into thedifficult challenges that we face today. For awhile the pace was incremental. Today, as theseriousness of these problems has become ever present in every American’s life, the pacehas quickened. But for the first time in a long time, there also are competing currents of hope and possibility. When I spoke at the Law Center two years ago we were a nation at a crossroads, and weare still repairing the damage from those dark days. I spoke then about the erosion of Americans’ privacy, and the need for us to restore our constitutional values and the rightsof ordinary Americans; about the importance of repairing a broken oversight process andinstilling greater accountability, and about renewing the public’s confidence in our justicesystem. Over the last two years, that is what we have begun to do.Our work included a steadfast inquiry into the U.S. Attorney firing scandal andpoliticized hiring at the Department of Justice. We exposed the partisan excesses andillegalities of the Gonzales regime that so degraded the Justice Department. We fought for access to the secret legal opinions of the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales JusticeDepartment by which they bent the law to excuse illegality, from warrantless wiretapping
Digitally signedby Joseph Zernik DN: cn=Joseph
Zernik, o, ou,email=jz12345@earthlink.net, c=USDate: 2010.08.0516:33:09 +03'00'
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to torture. It was in connection with a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that theinfamous 2002 torture memo was withdrawn. Journalists like Jane Mayer and CharlieSavage, and alienated former insiders like Jack Goldsmith and James Comey, helped givethe American people an outline of what had taken place in the secret governing processesof the Bush administration.This year is different. I was at the White House two weeks ago when President Obamasigned into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. That bill corrects the overreaching by activist members of the United States Supreme Court who misinterpreted the law andgranted license to companies to discriminate against women employees, so long as thoseemployers concealed their illegal actions for a mere six months. The checks and balancesin our system of government finally worked last month to correct that harmful error. Butit took two years during which a filibuster led by Senate Republicans prevented correctiveaction. Instead of the presidential veto promised by former President Bush, our new Senate was able to do the right thing, and our new President proudly signed thisrestoration of civil rights as the first legislative bill of his presidency. Already this year we have considered and confirmed the historic nomination of Eric H.Holder Jr. to be the Attorney General of the United States. I hope that the manner in which it concluded, with a strong bipartisan vote to confirm him, is a good sign. Attorney General Holder certainly is a welcome change. He is committed to restoring therule of law and, as President Obama said in his inaugural address, “to reject as false thechoice between our safety and our ideals.” Attorney General Holder understands themoral and legal obligations to protect the fundamental rights of all Americans, and torespect the human rights of all. The Nation was reassured when, in answer to my firstquestion to him at his confirmation hearing, he declared that “waterboarding is torture”and that no one is above the law.The confirmation of Eric Holder is a marker of how far we have come as a Nation. Wehave come from a time many years ago when a United States Attorney General believedthat the Constitution did not allow African Americans to be considered citizens, to theday when an African American now serves as our Attorney General. It was, after all, aformer Attorney General who authored the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denyingthe humanity of slaves, former slaves and free men. That is not what the United StatesConstitution said. That is not consistent with the promise of America. We have comefrom a time, within the lifetimes of some of us in this room, when Washington hotelsdenied service on the basis of race. And we have also come from a time, just five decades
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ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was the place where civil rights bills were sentto die, to a day where it is the place where we work to fulfill the promise of equalopportunity in our Nation’s founding documents.The Attorney General, however, is only the first of 28 leadership positions that need to beconfirmed by the Senate to help revitalize and restore the Justice Department. We also have more than 60 vacancies in our Federal courts. We are lucky to have JudgeKatzmann serving, and I hope that he takes advantage of his lifetime tenure to servemany more years. But for the existing vacancies and those that will arise in the JudicialBranch, the Judiciary Committee has a vital role. Sometimes our work is widely known by the public; more often it is not. But it is always bears directly on the quality andtemperament and public trust in a justice system that has long been the envy of the world. I believe this President’s appreciation for the courts will motivate him to nominatepeople of the highest caliber and qualifications. I have long supported a comprehensive judgeship bill, which is already 12 years overdue. We need to restore judicial pay and tohonor the role that Federal judges play in our independent judiciary.The Judiciary Committee has a full docket with matters ranging from review of expiringprovisions of the PATRIOT Act, and reforming our patent laws in order to help revitalizeour economic engine, to passing personal data protection legislation and strengtheningour anti-corruption and anti-fraud laws. I hope that this year we can also strengthenpenalties for violent crimes motivated by prejudice and hate. The President has already moved to increase transparency in government, but we can make even greaterimprovements to the Freedom of Information Act, and we may finally be able enact amedia shield law. These are all issues that you will be hearing about in the days, weeksand months ahead.The President is right that we need to focus on fixing the problems that exist andimproving the future for hardworking Americans. I wholeheartedly agree and expect theJudiciary Committee and the Senate to act accordingly. But that does not mean that weshould abandon seeking ways to provide accountability for what has been a dangerousand disastrous diversion from American law and values. Many Americans feel we need toget to the bottom of what went wrong. We need to be able to read the page before we turnit. We will work with the Obama administration to fix those parts of our government that went off course. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department is one of those
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