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[Page S3000]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONFIRMATION OF DANIEL COLLINS
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, I rise today in opposition to the
nomination of Daniel Collins to the United States Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit.
Mr. Collins had been nominated to a California seat on the Ninth
Circuit over the objections of Senator Harris and myself. Neither
Senator Harris nor I returned blue slips for Mr. Collins, yet the
majority moved forward with his nomination, disregarding our concerns.
This vote on Mr. Collins follows on the heels of last week's vote on
Kenneth Lee, another Ninth Circuit nominee who lacked blue slips from
me and Senator Harris.
So, once again, we see the majority violating Senate norms and
traditions by ignoring home-State Senators, including the Judiciary
Committee's ranking member, and stacking the courts with ideologues.
This breakdown in Senate traditions is harmful to all of us,
Democrats and Republicans. It is also unnecessary.
As I have highlighted before, Democratic Senators have been willing
to work with the White House to find consensus picks for the circuit
courts, but that willingness has been rebuffed by the Trump
administration and disregarded by the majority.
The majority's decision to once again ignore blue slips is short-
sighted. After all, what goes around comes around.
Senator Harris and I refused to return blue slips on Mr. Collins for
several reasons.
I have used a bipartisan instate screening commission to vet
potential nominees to California district and Ninth Circuit seats for
my entire career. These are highly respected lawyers from throughout
the State, and they have reviewed and recommended nominees from
Democratic and Republican administrations.
My instate bipartisan commission raised concerns about Mr. Collins's
rigidity, temperament, and history of taking positions in litigation
for the purposes of overturning precedent and challenging legal
boundaries.
The role of a judge is to be an impartial arbiter, not an advocate
and not someone with an agenda, particularly an agenda of overturning
precedent.
Based on this, I am concerned that Mr. Collins has not demonstrated
and does not embody the characteristics that we expect of all Federal
judges.
I also believe that Mr. Collins's record on women's reproductive
rights, executive power, civil liberties, and criminal justice matters
puts him far outside the judicial mainstream.
For example, Mr. Collins was a strong advocate for the Bush
administration's use of military commissions to try enemy combatants
held at Guantanamo Bay. He even went so far as to argue that the
President's authority as Commander-in-Chief allowed him to bypass
Congress and create these commissions without congressional approval.
Mr. Collins also wrote a law review piece in which he argued that
Miranda v. Arizona, a longstanding Supreme Court precedent that
protects the rights of individuals, should be overturned.
For the last decade, Mr. Collins has also defended numerous chemical
and energy companies in lawsuits brought by homeowners, Tribes, and
local governments. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have argued that
these companies contributed to climate change and its effects, such as
increasing the severity of storms and causing sea levels to rise.
In several of these lawsuits, Mr. Collins argued that climate change
is not even real. For example, in a case representing Shell Oil
Company, Mr. Collins wrote that ``climate change allegedly results from
the aggregate effects of greenhouse gas emissions from billions of
sources around the world accumulating in the global atmosphere over the
course of centuries, and thus it cannot be attributed to . . . energy
companies.''
In addition, in questions for the record, he refused to acknowledge
that climate change is real and that human activity contributes to it.
I understand that Mr. Collins was representing clients in these
lawsuits, but he was the one who chose which arguments to make,
including arguments that climate change is not real. We cannot have a
judge on the Ninth Circuit who denies climate change and its impacts.
At his hearing, Mr. Collins was willing to answer questions from
Republicans on his personal views, but not answer similar questions
from Democrats.
For instance, when asked how he ``feel[s] about the First Step Act,''
Mr. Collins said: ``I think that the First Step Act . . . appeared to
me to be a balanced approach to reform some of the sentencing
provisions which seemed unduly harsh.''
But when asked by Senator Blumenthal whether he believed Brown v.
Board of Education was correctly decided, Mr. Collins refused to
answer.
Nominees should not answer Republican questions and evade Democratic
ones, especially when it comes to answering questions about Brown v.
Board of Education, a monumental case whose correctness cannot and
should not be questioned and has been answered by previous Republican
nominees, including Chief Justice Roberts.
Taken as a whole, I believe Mr. Collins is far outside the legal
mainstream.
Given concerns about his temperament and commitment to upholding
precedent and given the positions he has taken on executive power,
criminal justice, and other matters that could come before the Ninth
Circuit, I cannot support Mr. Collins.
I voted against Mr. Collins, and I urged my colleagues to do the
same.
____________________
