| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| As honestly as we can within the provisions of the Constitution of the United States, we still work together as one people, and we preserve our unity even when we seem to disagree with each other. | ||
| Now, that work of insisting on respecting the Constitution's balance is yours as well as mine. | ||
| And it is work that will never end for as long as the Constitution lasts and for as long as the American Republic lasts. | ||
| It is your work and mine to do, and I welcome you to the task. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I probably should begin by asking if you can hear me as well as I can hear you. | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, and other members of the committee, as you know, I did not ask to make a formal and pre-prepared statement, but I would like to accept your invitation to say a few words before our dialogue together does begin. | ||
| And I would like to start, maybe in a very obvious way, simply by saying thanks for some things. | ||
| To begin with, to thank every member of this committee who, in the waning and the very hectic days that you went through prior to the summer recess, nonetheless found some time to see me when I came by to meet you in most cases for the first time. | ||
| And I was grateful for the reception and the courtesy that every one of you gave to me. | ||
| Equally obviously, I would like simply to say here what I've already said privately this morning, or at least quietly this morning, in thanking both Senator Humphrey and Senator Rudman for their generosity to me in their introduction and their sponsorship of me before you. | ||
| And I will have to continue, as I have been trying to do for the past seven or eight weeks now, to say some adequate thanks to the President of the United States for the confidence that he showed in me in making that nomination. | ||
| I have not succeeded in doing that adequately yet, but I will keep trying. | ||
| In fact, I came to the notice of probably most of you on this committee when I stood next to the President and tried, again with great difficulty that afternoon in late July to express some sense of the honor that I felt despite the surprise and even shock of the event to me. | ||
| It's equally incumbent on me to try to express some sense of the honor that I feel today in appearing before you as you represent the Senate of the United States and discharging your own responsibility to review the President's nomination. | ||
| I could only adopt what Senator Metzenbaum said earlier this morning about the grandeur of this process of which we are a part. | ||
| I mentioned to you the great surprise that I had on July 23rd in finding myself where I was. | ||
| I certainly found very quickly that I had no reason to be surprised at the interest which the United States and actually a good deal of the world suddenly took in me as an individual. | ||
| And despite the reams of paper and, I suppose, the forests that have fallen to produce that paper in the time between July 23rd, I would like to take a minute before we begin our dialogue together, to say something to you about how I feel, about the beginnings that I have come from and about the experiences that I have had that bear on the kind of judge that I am and the kind of | ||
| judge that I can be expected to be. | ||
| I think you know that I spent most of my boyhood in a small town in New Hampshire, Weya, New Hampshire. | ||
| It was a town large in geography, small in population. | ||
| The physical space, the open space between people, however, was not matched by the inner space between them because as everybody knows who has lived in a small town, there is a closeness of people in a small town which is unattainable anywhere else. | ||
| There was in that town no section or place or neighborhood that was determined by anybody's occupation or by anybody's bank balance. | ||
| Everybody knew everybody else's business, or at least thought they did. | ||
| And we were, in a very true sense, intimately aware of other lives. | ||
| We were aware of lives that were easy, and we were aware of lives that were very hard. | ||
| Another thing that we were aware of in that place was the responsibility of people to govern themselves. | ||
| It was a responsibility that they owed to themselves, and it was a responsibility that they owed and owe to their neighbors. | ||
| I first learned about that, or I first learned the practicalities of that, when I used to go over to the town hall in Weya, New Hampshire on town meeting day. | ||
| And I would sit in the benches in the back of the town hall after school. | ||
| And that's where I began my lessons in practical government. | ||
| As I think you know, I went to high school in Concord, New Hampshire, which is a bigger place. | ||
| And I went on from there to college and to study law in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford, England, which are bigger places still. | ||
| And after I'd finished law school, I came back to New Hampshire and I began the practice of law. | ||
| And I think probably it's fair to say that I resumed the study of practical government. | ||
| I went to work for a law firm in Concord, New Hampshire, and I practiced there for several years. | ||
| I then became, as I think you know, an assistant attorney general in the criminal division of that office. | ||
| I was then lucky to be deputy attorney general to Warren Rudman and I succeeded him as Attorney General in 1976. | ||
| The experience of government, though, did not wait until the day came that I entered public as opposed to private law practice, because although in those years of private practice I served the private clients of the firm, I also did something in those days which was very common then. | ||
| Perhaps it is less common today. | ||
| I know it is, but it was an accepted part of private practice in those days, and that was to take on a fair share of representation of clients who did not have the money to pay. | ||
| I remember very well that the first day that I ever spent by myself in a courtroom, I spent in a courtroom representing a woman whose personal life had become such a shambles that she had lost the custody of her children and she was trying to get them back. | ||
| She was not the last of such clients. | ||
| I represented clients with domestic relations problems who lived sometimes, it seemed to me, in appalling circumstances. | ||
| I can remember representing a client who was trying to pull a life together after being evicted because she couldn't pay the rent. | ||
| And although cases like that were not the those were not the cases upon which the firm paid the rent, those were not remarkable cases for lawyers in private practice in those days before governmentally funded legal services. | ||
| And they were the cases that we took at that time because taking them was the only way to make good on the on the supposedly open door of our courts to the people who needed to get inside and to get what courts had to offer through the justice system. | ||
| And I think it is fair to say that even I am glad it is fair to say that even today with so much governmentally funded legal service there are lawyers in private practice in our profession who are doing the same thing. | ||
| As you know I did go on to public legal service and in the course of doing that I met not only legislators and the administrators that one finds in a government but I began to become familiar with the criminal justice system in my state and in our nation. | ||
| I met victims and sometimes I met the survivors of victims. | ||
| I met defendants. | ||
| I met that train of witnesses from the clergy to con artists who pass through our system and find themselves either willingly or unwillingly part of a search for truth and part of a search for those results that we try to sum up with the words of justice. | ||
| As you also know, after those years I became a trial judge and my experience with the working of government and the judicial system broadened there because I was a trial judge of general jurisdiction and I saw every sort and condition of the people of my state that a trial court of general jurisdiction is exposed to. | ||
| I saw litigants in international commercial litigation for millions and I saw children who were the unwitting victims of domestic disputes and custody fights which somehow somehow seemed to defy any reasonable solution however hard we worked at it. | ||
| I saw once again the denizens of the criminal justice system and I saw domestic litigants. | ||
| I saw appellants from the juvenile justice system who were appealing their findings of delinquency. | ||
| And in fact I had maybe one of the great experiences of my entire life in seeing week in and week out the members of the trial juries of our states who are rightly called the consciences of our communities. | ||
| And I worked with them and I learned from them and I will never forget my days with them. | ||
| And when those days on the trial court were over, there were two experiences that I took away with me or two lessons that I had learned. | ||
| And the lessons remain with me today. | ||
| The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we are in, whatever we are doing, whether we are on a trial court or an appellate court, at the end of our task, some human being is going to be affected. | ||
| Some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do, whether we do it as trial judges or whether we do it as appellate judges as far removed from the trial arena as it is possible to be. | ||
| The second lesson that I learned in that time is that if indeed we are going to be trial judges whose rulings will affect the lives of other people and who are going to change their lives by what we do, We had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right. | ||
| And I am conscious of those two lessons, as I have been for all of the years that I was on an appellate court. | ||
| I am conscious of them as I sit here today, suddenly finding myself the nominee of the President of the United States to undertake the greatest responsibility that any judge in our republic can undertake. | ||
| The responsibility to join with eight other people to make the promises of the Constitution a reality for our time and to preserve that Constitution for the generations that will follow us after we are gone from here. | ||
| And I am mindful of those two lessons when I tell you this that if you believe and the Senate of the United States believes that it is right to confirm my nomination, | ||
| then I will accept those responsibilities as obligations to all of the people in the United States whose lives will be affected by my stewardship of the Constitution. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
|
unidentified
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Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died at the age of 85. | |
| Appointed to the High Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, he served from 1990 until 2009. | ||
| Justice Souter appeared on C-SPAN many times, and you can watch those programs in our video library. | ||
| They include his confirmation hearings, his swearing-in ceremony in 1990, and remarks on the Constitution from 2009, speaking to his alma mater, Harvard University. | ||
| It's all available to you at our website, cspan.org. | ||
| Less than 24 hours after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced plans to completely modernize the nation's air traffic control system, the FAA disclosed that another telecommunications outage hit a radar display facility near Philadelphia just before 4 a.m. Eastern on Friday. | ||
| That facility guides aircraft in and out of Newark International Airport. | ||
| It's one of the busiest in the country. | ||
| This is the second radar and communication outage of at least 90 seconds reported at the facility in the last week. | ||
| The first resulted in widespread flight delays and cancellations. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. |