Original subtitles

I give you, then, a great Republican,

and a great patriot:

Patrick J. Buchanan!

This, my friends...

This is Radical Feminism...

the agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America.

Abortion on demand,

a litmus test for the Supreme Court,

homosexual rights...

Roe v. Wade has got to go!

There is a religious war going on

in this country.

We're here, we're queer...

It is a cultural war

as critical to the kind of nation we shall be

as the Cold War itself,

for this war is for the soul of America.

And in that struggle for the soul of America,

Clinton and Clinton are on the other side,

and George Bush is on our side!

The role of the Supreme Court is to protect the fabric of the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights,

and it should be a stabilizing force in most cases,

but it has, at times, been a radical force in our country,

because it stood up for the rights of ordinary people

when they were being abused by our government.

I am going to continue to put judges on the bench who know

that their role is to interpret the law,

not legislate from the federal bench,

and we are making dramatic moves in that direction.

Tense music

curious theme music

Part of the role of the Court is that it

is gonna protect people who may be vulnerable

in the political process.

I assure you, I have no agenda.

My only agenda is to be a good judge.

There's no difference between a white snake and a black snake;

they'll both bite.

My approach, I believe, is neither liberal

nor conservative.

My colleagues and I want to be the most trusted people

in America.

I think we all feel strongly in this

country about our privacy; I do.

I believe the Constitution protects the right to privacy.

Are you a gang rapist?

No.

Life's challenges place hurdles every day,

and one of the wonderful parts of the courage of America

is that we overcome them.

Do you affirm that the testimony you're about to give

before the committee will be the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

I do.

Ominous music

energetic percussion

We're getting ready to do it now.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the President of the United States of America,

William Jefferson Clinton!

This was a time for President Clinton...

and for the Democratic Party...

when the ideology of judges was not the paramount concern.

President Clinton had a lot of other things to worry about

at the time he was making these nominations,

and so he didn't want to pick big political fights.

I did not anticipate

having the opportunity to make an appointment

at this early stage, so we don't have a big bank

of potential nominees.

I'll go to work on it tomorrow.

It took Bill Clinton a long time to settle on naming

Ruth Ginsburg.

It was several months.

If confirmed... and that seems likely...

she'll join Sandra Day O'Connor as the second woman on

the Supreme Court.

What's appealing to many members of Congress is her moderate

views, which will likely mean a quick confirmation to the Court.

Clinton's looking for safe picks,

but Ruth Bader Ginsburg is actually an interesting

figure here.

She had spent her time in the '70s effectively doing for

Feminism what Thurgood Marshall had done for civil rights in the

'50s, and so she was very much a pick out of that tradition and

someone who could be counted on to champion those causes

on the Court.

She was 60 at the time.

Whereas most of the Civil Rights community heralded her

accomplishments,

there were some raised eyebrows about whether

this was the most strategic choice that President Clinton

could make, when presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush

had been appointing very young people to the Court.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg... the notorious RBG... was nominated,

Liberal groups and, actually, women's groups were not so

thrilled about it, some of them, because she was viewed as so

moderate.

Ginsburg is the first High Court nominee by a

Democratic president in more than 26 years,

and would be the first Jewish justice since 1969.

My approach, I believe, is neither liberal

nor conservative.

She sails through her confirmation hearings;

there's very little opposition to her,

even from Conservatives.

A near-unanimous vote of confidence today for

Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Senate voted 96 to three to confirm her to serve on

the Supreme Court.

When Justice Ginsburg joined the Court,

she really appreciated the support of Justice O'Connor.

When Justice Ginsburg wrote her very first opinion,

Justice O'Connor sent her a reassuring note from the bench.

She said, "Whenever you have any doubts,

just do it."

That was Justice O'Connor's philosophy of life.

And she said, "You've done it here,

this is your first opinion, and it's a good one."

And even though Justice O'Connor dissented,

she wanted to give that support.

Justice Harry Blackmun announced his retirement from

the Supreme Court today.

We are very close... it's a very intimate group...

and it's like a family member leaving.

Stephen Breyer had been the runner-up for the seat that went

to Ginsburg, so President Clinton named him.

Who's faster, the Judiciary or the Executive?

No, no, he's mighty fast.

Mighty fast.

Judiciary lasts longer!

That's...

He was confirmed by a wide margin.

By vote of 87 ayes, nine nays,

the nomination is confirmed.

For 11 years, between Stephen Breyer's appointment and

John Roberts' appointment in 2005,

there were no vacancies on the Court;

that's an astonishingly long period!

The longest period since, I believe, the 1820s.

So, you know, these people got to know each other awfully well.

There was a pragmatic center on the Supreme Court in the 1990s.

It united Chief Justice Rehnquist with Justices

O'Connor, and Kennedy, and Justice Breyer,

the great pragmatist who was constantly reaching across the

aisle and trying to come up with moderate compromises.

Justice Breyer referred to Justice Kennedy and O'Connor

as the "grown-ups," and he contrasted them with the more

fire-breathing Conservatives like Justice Thomas,

who was Justice Breyer's good friend... they got along

very well.

But in all sorts of cases, the Court was able to forge

moderate compromises.

Don't forget, for a lot of years in there,

it was "Who knows what Justice Kennedy's gonna do?

Who knows what Justice O'Connor is gonna do?"

And Justice Brennan used to famously tell his clerks,

"What's the most important constitutional rule you

can know? What is it?

Five.

That's it.

It's not anything else other than getting to five votes."

It was actually a kind of fun court to cover,

because it was more of a mystery;

you didn't know the outcome when you were going into the case.

And that just makes the whole Court much more like the country

a moderate-right court that sometimes did liberal things.

One of the hallmarks of the period was a revival of the

Court's interest in states' rights within

the federal system.

The legal scholarship referred to it as

the "Federalism Revolution."

In the 1990s, there was a series of cases that the Court issued

where it pushed back on broad federal power that had existed

since the New Deal.

For example, the Court invalidated portions of the

Violence Against Women Act,

and also portions of the Gun-Free School Zone Act.

The breadth of powers of the federal government were somewhat

reduced by these cases,

and the powers of the states to act and regulate were

commensurably increased.

There was a sense on the Rehnquist Court of moving the

law in a conservative direction,

but doing so with respect for precedent,

with respect to the political process.

In the mid-'70s, when I clerked for Justice Rehnquist,

he was clearly the most conservative justice on the

Court, and he had certain issues that he was

very, very focused on.

One of them was criminal procedure...

things like Miranda and the Exclusionary Rule...

and a number of things that the Warren Court

had put in place that Conservatives at that time

looked at and said, "Where did this come from?

Where is this in the Constitution?"

Good morning!

Good morning, Mister Justice! Congratulations!

Thank you, thank you.

What's interesting about Justice Rehnquist is that,

in many ways, when he became the Chief,

he became a more pragmatic justice.

When we were clerking, if he thought he'd had a chance to get

the Miranda rule... that says warnings when you are in custody

and arrested... if he had a chance then to get that

reversed, my hunch is he would have gone for it.

My feeling... like most everybody else's, I think...

is "Don't fix anything that's not broken,"

and so far as I know, there's nothing broken.

- I'll see you all later! - Thank you.

Well, they had a chance in the Dickerson case,

and he wrote the opinion that said, "No,

we're not gonna reverse Miranda,

'cause Miranda's been around for a long time,

and it's working okay, and we don't need to upset the

expectations."

I've always regarded Miranda as fairly debatable,

but cases like Brown versus the Board of Education,

Gideon, others, they were changes,

but I think certainly changes for the better.

And I think almost all of the, uh...

decisions of the Warren Court... with very few exceptions...

have been accepted and become part of constitutional law.

Last year, our court was urged to overrule the Miranda

decision; we declined to do so.

What he stands for to me is the idea that a justice

can have a very strong judicial philosophy

while also maintaining

a strong sense of institutional integrity.

Can also shape and move the direction of the Court,

but not undermine trust

in it

because there is such an important piece in his thinking

about respect for the institution.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to say that

out of all of the Chiefs that she worked with,

"My Chief" was her favorite she called him "My Chief,"

and she loved him!

She loved the fact the he would always reward her 'cause she was

so fast.

Justice Ginsburg was a force of nature,

and she always insisted on getting out what she called her

"homework assignments"... her draft opinions...

more quickly than all the other justices.

Chief Justice Rehnquist was viewed by Liberals and

Conservatives as a model administrator,

extremely fair, and he was considered a very successful

Chief as a result.

The time when I was a law clerk,

there were kind of personal antagonisms on the Court,

which had... you know, I don't know really the root of them,

uh, but there was ill feeling.

I don't think there's any ill feeling on our court today.

I think we not just have a civil relationship,

but a cordial relationship with one another.

The Court is inherently taking on cases that

don't have easy answers.

They take cases for one of two reasons;

it's either because the lower courts have disagreed on some

quite-important issue of federal law.

The other reason is that there's some issue that is just so

important that the Court decides it has to be the one to decide

it, and a great example of that is Bush v. Gore,

where we didn't know who the president was.

Voters looking for a clear distinction between

George W. Bush and Al Gore may want to judge them by their

likely picks for the US Supreme Court.

I will protect and defend a woman's right to choose!

The voters will know I'll put competent judges on the bench,

people who will strictly interpret the Constitution,

and will not use the bench to write social policy.

The presidential election turns out to be one of the most

closely-contested in American history.

Tense music

We call Florida in the Al Gore column.

The Bush campaign is now contesting the projected victory

for Al Gore.

All right, we're officially saying that Florida is too close

to call.

Voter counters are being called back to work to count

absentee ballots.

It's clear on election night that the 25 electoral votes of

Florida will decide it all, and the race dwindles down to

something like a few hundred votes.

Right at the time of the election,

the Gore people had lawyers in Florida before the sun came up

the next day,

and the Bush people were trying to get caught up.

There's litigation going all over the place...

absentee ballots, military ballots, recounts...

We have people who are not supervisor of election employees

handling ballots, we have people shuffling ballots around like

they're playing cards...

That's absolutely false.

Everybody was trained, as you see,

and you should go out there yourselves...

your cameras work with long lenses.

It is a very calm process.

Nothing like that is happening whatsoever.

Soft tense music

We'll go ahead and proceed

in the order, again, that I first mentioned.

And so, Ms. Berkowitz, thank you very much.

I understand you're from West Palm Beach?

- Yes, I am. - Thank you for being with us.

There was not one... while I was there,

in a good 45-minutes time... there was not one inspector that

offered to assist any of these voters that were turned away.

Throughout the day, we started getting phone calls from, uh,

voters saying that they had been turned away at the

different precincts.

We had many calls from students from Bethune-Cookman College,

where they were sent from from one poll to...

one polling precinct to another polling precinct,

pretty much given the run-around.

You have an election in the state where the

two frontrunners are divided by a little over 500 votes.

It matters that Florida conducted routine purges where

they regularly got things wrong and eliminated lawful voters

from the rolls,

who often times showed up and didn't know that

they were no longer registered to vote.

It matters that they had these lists of people who had similar

names as those who committed felonies but were lawful voters

who could not vote because now, they were on these lists where

they were considered felons.

Things seemed to be going off the rails.

A month had gone by and we didn't know who

the president was.

What to do? What do to?

Plunging right into the middle of the presidential election

controversy, the Supreme Court today agreed to hear the case

brought by George Bush to try to stop the Florida recount.

Bush is asking the High Court to the overturn

Friday's decision by the Florida State Supreme Court ordering a

hand-count of thousands of ballots... ballots Gore says

have never been counted; Bush says have been counted two,

three, maybe four times.

Count every vote!

Every vote counts!

Count every vote!

Every vote counts!

How many times?

How many times?

I'm here because I believe in Al Gore,

but I think it's bigger than Gore and Bush;

I think it's a matter of our democracy.

I can't imagine the Supreme Court wanting to go down in

history as just allowing this to go on and on.

You know, there's gotta be some supreme power to stop this.

We're very gratified for the opportunity to be here before

the United States Supreme Court.

We're very pleased that the Supreme Court took this case.

We petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case on Friday

night, they took the case on Saturday,

set it for arguments today.

The justices had prepared exceedingly well,

they're aware of what the issues are,

and they know how important it is to decide something soon.

I would be literally shocked if the Supreme Court thought it was

in the interest of this nation for them to interfere in a

State Court issue that has been appropriately handled by the

Florida Supreme Court.

I would beg of them

to find their way clear

to allow for the votes to be counted.

I don't think the justices care that it's Bush versus Gore,

or if it were Gore versus Bush.

What they care about's how to interpret the Constitution.

What are the enduring values that are gonna stand

a generation from now?

I don't remember Brett Kavanaugh at all.

I do remember John Roberts.

I remember asking John Roberts for a little advice with respect

to one of the arguments that I was making;

I think he spent about an hour talking to me about it.

His name doesn't appear on the Supreme Court briefs,

nor does Kavanaugh, nor does Barrett.

But the number of Republican lawyers who participated in one

way or the other or appeared on television

talking about this issue that was the center of attention

of the whole world, in a sense,

it's not surprising that there were lots of people on one side

and lots of people on the other side.

Soft tense music

A sharply-divided United States Supreme Court appears to have

ended the five-week presidential election drama

in favor of Texas Governor George W. Bush.

In a blistering dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote,

"The identity of the loser is perfectly clear.

It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial

guardian of the rule of law."

Not only did the Court decide the election,

but they decided it on a novel theory of equal protection that,

in that same decision, they told us would not apply

to future cases.

It opened the Court to charges that this was not a

legally-principled decision; that this was just an assertion

of what was, in effect, political power

by Republican-appointed justices to put a Republican into

the White House.

Whether the country or Gore agreed with it or not,

there was not a question that night about whether or not it

would be followed, and the thing that worries me now is if we had

another Bush v. Gore, would the country go along?

There's been some suggestion by poll-takers that that trend down

for the Judicial Branch began with the Bush/Gore decision,

and that could be

something that triggered public re-examination.

Do you think people thought it was too political,

or the Court had become too political?

Is that...

I... I'm not sure, but I suppose that's part of it,

yes.

And of course, any time you're deciding a case involving a

presidential election, it's awfully close to politics.

Justice Kennedy and Justice Thomas,

we welcome you to the hearing today.

Mr. Serrano?

Thank you, Mister Chairman.

Very rarely does a person... a member of Congress,

a representative of the people...

have an opportunity to speak to Supreme Court justices

in a public forum,

and I just felt it necessary that there was a statement that

I had to make, but I do this with the utmost respect.

I have always looked at you in a way... and still do...

much different from the way I look at any other body in our

government.

But then, this past year, you went and broke my heart

by getting involved in a political decision.

I... I think, um...

you are very much entitled to criticize;

I think anyone is.

And I think accepting that criticism

comes with the turf.

I can assure you

that, having been at the Court now for almost a decade,

I have yet to hear the first political conversation.

And I heard none during the consideration of that.

I think... I hope, I trust, I'm confident...

that over the next few years, as the legal community,

the academic profession, um...

the people in political life know about this decision,

understand that this was in the courts,

we did not bring it there, that it involved a constitutional

issue of the gravest importance, decided four to three by a state

court on a federal issue,

that is was our responsibility to take the case.

Ultimately, the power

and the prestige and the respect of the Court

depends on trust.

My colleagues and I want to be the most trusted people

in America.

Everyday Americans, many of whom had never really thought

much about the US Supreme Court or its impact on our lives,

realized the tremendous power that this court has,

and certainly, to everyday outside observers,

it appeared that these justices were picking sides in a

political dispute, rather than interpreting what the

Constitution means and what it should mean

in something as important as a presidential election.

Congratulations.

band playing fanfare

band playing "Hail to the Chief"

After Bush v. Gore,

the Court kind of came back together.

If you're a Supreme Court justice,

you know you're stuck with these other eight people

pretty much for the rest of your life, and they have always,

in the past, kind of found a way to get along.

I think it had some very quiet terms almost deliberately after

that so it could stay out of the public eye and stay out of the

public consciousness, and let the aftershocks of Bush v.

Gore kind of dissipate before it got back into the business of

making people angry again.

Soft curious music

As long as there was a Justice O'Connor or a Justice Kennedy on

the Court,

the Conservative majority was always vulnerable

to one or two cases each year in which that Centrist person would

go over and vote with the Liberals.

It was because of Justice Kennedy that the Court

went down the road to recognizing LGBT rights.

In 2003, the Supreme Court gets this case Lawrence versus Texas,

which is really a direct assault on an earlier decision called

Bowers versus Hardwick.

Both cases involve homosexual sodomy.

Bowers versus Hardwick is decided in 1986.

The Court essentially says, "There is no fundamental right

to privacy that would encompass a right to engage in homosexual

conduct, even in the confines of your home."

We thought about it and we said,

"Look, the Court has changed;

there's new, more-sympathetic justices."

And the thing about this system when they take cases on a

discretionary basis is

if they don't have an interest in overruling Bowers,

they're not gonna take the case.

When they granted the case,

that's when we knew that he had a very high degree of chance

that we were gonna make history here.

Mr. Smith.

Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court.

The state of Texas in this case claims the right to criminally

punish any unmarried adult couple for engaging in any form

of consensual sexual intimacy that the state happens to

disapprove of.

It further claims that there's no constitutional problem raised

by a law the criminalizes forms of sexual intimacy only for

same-sex couples and not for anyone else in the state,

who has the right to make a free choice to engage in the

identical conduct.

There was enormous pressure from knowing that this was going

to be the Brown versus Board of Education

of this group of people if we won.

Usually, you don't get to be there when the Court hands down

a decision, but this was the last day of the term,

and they were clearly down to their last few cases,

so we knew to go.

All the people from the Gay Rights Movement are in this

room, and the Chief Justice said,

"Justice Kennedy is gonna deliver the opinion in Lawrence

versus Texas."

Bowers was not correct when it was decided,

and it is not correct today.

It ought not to remain binding precedent.

Bowers versus Hardwick should be... and now is... overruled.

And this wave of emotion sweeps through the room.

People were crying and

It was not the sort of thing that happens in the

Supreme Court courtroom very often.

It's a great day for all Americans because the Court has

now recognized that all Americans are shielded from

government intrusion into the bedroom and from their choices

of sexual partners, sexual intimacy.

We're glad not only that this ruling lets us get on with our

lives, but that it opens the door for gay people all across

the country to be treated equally.

It's like the Fourth of July and the Gay Pride rolled into

one with this decision!

And paving the way, some feel,

for the legalization of same-sex marriage in this country.

The justices take their decisions very seriously.

Justice Kennedy, he described the loneliness of being alone

with the red brief and the blue brief,

and making these decisions that affect millions.

And that humility, that deliberation,

really taking time to make up your mind and being open to the

possibility of changing your mind was characteristic of

Justice Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy has

an unshakeable commitment to liberty.

And Justice Kennedy's most famous line in any Supreme Court

"At the heart of liberty

is the right to define your own conception of meaning,

of the universe, and the mystery of human life."

Jointly, Justice Kennedy and Justice O'Connor were the middle

of the Court

during many of the Rehnquist years.

Surprising news from the United States Supreme Court:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement.

When Justice O'Connor retired, it was the Kennedy Court,

and the phrase was:

"It's Justice Kennedy's world

and we're all just living in it."

band playing fanfare

The main thing for George W. Bush in nominating justices to

the Supreme Court was not to make the same mistake his

father did,

and his father's mistake... in George W. Bush's view...

was choosing David Souter.

After his first few years, he turned out to be a very solid

and consistent vote for the Liberal wing of the Court,

and so the mantra for Conservatives was

"No more Souters."

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts stepped into the

spotlight today at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Roberts, who worked for both President Reagan and

the first President Bush, later launched a successful private

law career, during which he argued 39 cases before the

Supreme Court.

John Roberts was very well known to the

Washington DC legal community.

He had been a Supreme Court law clerk...

for Rehnquist, actually.

And he had been down to Palm Beach County with the young

Republican lawyers working for candidate George Bush in the

2000 election, in the aftermath.

He was put on the DC Circuit Federal Appeals Court,

and certainly, people assumed he might well rise to the

Supreme Court one day.

He's an accidental chief justice because,

right on the eve of his nomination hearings,

Chief Justice Rehnquist died of cancer.

Chief Justice Rehnquist had been sick for a while,

but when the 2004 term ends

without any announcement from him that he's retiring,

I think the general assumption was that he was gonna be

on the Court at least a few more years.

Indeed, it's because Rehnquist doesn't announce his retirement

that Justice O'Connor does.

And then right before Roberts' confirmation hearings are set to

start in September of 2005,

Rehnquist dies from complications of thyroid cancer.

The White House quickly moves Roberts into Rehnquist's slot.

I am honored and humbled by the confidence that the President

has shown in me.

There's been 46 presidents, I think.

There have only been 17 chief justices.

The chief justice is at the pinnacle,

so it's not only his own... or her own... personal opinions

about how cases should be decided,

but how that decision will play in the long term in connection

with the institution of the Court,

and the importance of public respect for the institution.

I would say it was a slightly-controversial

nomination because

various memos came to light from when he had worked as a young

lawyer in the Reagan Administration.

You wrote that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights

Act... and I quote... "Should not be made too easy to prove,

since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference

imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes."

Democrats yesterday focused much of their fire on

memos Roberts wrote when he worked in the Reagan

Administration in the early and mid-1980s.

The memos opposed strengthening the Voting Rights Act,

and opposed a variety of measures to equalize

opportunities for women and minorities.

Why, at that point, did you want to make Section 2 cases

so difficult to prove?

Senator, you keep referring to what I supported and what I

wanted to do.

I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer;

it was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships.

I was not shaping administration policy.

The administration policy was shaped by the Attorney General

on whose staff I served.

When I examined Judge Roberts' record and his work

in the White House,

he seems to have consistently sided with those who were

dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial

discrimination in our political process.

These memos, long buried in the Reagan archives,

came to light during the nomination,

and provided the only real opposition to his nomination.

If I am confirmed,

I will confront every case with an open mind,

I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that

are presented,

I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues

on the bench,

and I will decide every case based on the record,

according to the rule of law,

without fear or favor,

to the best of my ability.

And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes,

and not to pitch or bat.

Soft tense music

The nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. of Maryland

to be Chief Justice of the United States is confirmed.

That opened up the spot for replacing

Justice O'Connor.

When Justice O'Connor retires, the second nominee to replace

her once John Roberts is moved over to Rehnquist's seat

is Harriet Miers, who is killed not by Progressives,

but by Conservatives, who are worried that she's not

conservative enough.

What do you think her chances of being confirmed are?

I think they're probably pretty high because...

and this should give the President some pause...

they're pretty high because the Democrats seem to like her.

Yeah.

And I think that oughta give

him reason to think that maybe he made a mistake.

It's that mentality that just helps to ramp up the perception

really, on both sides... that the Court has been politicized,

that the Court can be accused of acting in ways that smack

increasingly of political power and not judicial power.

President Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court

today.

He's been a federal appeals judge since 1990.

If confirmed this time, he'd replace Justice Sandra Day

O'Connor, who's retiring from the High Court.

The previous choice, Harriet Miers,

withdrew last week after strong opposition from Conservatives.

- Judge, thank you very much. - Thank you, Senator.

I enjoyed speaking with you.

The appointment of Justice Alito was far more significant

than the appointment of Chief Justice Roberts,

'cause it shifted the balance of the Court.

Thank you!

I talked to him about privacy;

he believed Griswold was settled law.

I asked him, "Was Roe settled law?"

And then, he retreated and said, uh,

"That case might come before me."

Thank you very much, um,

Mister Chairman.

Welcome, Judge Alito.

I'm one that believes that your appointment on the Supreme Court

is the pivotal appointment.

And because you replace Sandra Day O'Connor,

and because she was the fifth vote on 148 cases,

you well could be a very key and decisive vote.

And so, during these hearings, I think it's fair for us

to try to determine whether your legal reasoning is within the

mainstream of American legal thought,

and whether you're going to follow the law,

regardless of your personal views about the law.

Let me come now to the statement you made in

1985 that the Constitution does not provide a basis for a

woman's right to an abortion.

Do you agree with that statement today,

Judge Alito?

Well, that was a correct statement of what I thought in

1985 from my vantage point in 1985,

and that was as a line attorney in the Department of Justice in

the Reagan Administration.

Today, if the issue were to come before me... if I am fortunate

enough to be confirmed and the issue were to come before me...

then I would have to approach the question with an open mind.

The ayes are 58, the nays are 42.

The President's nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Of New Jersey to be an associate justice of the

Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed.

When Roberts and Alito join the Court,

it's not just what they bring in terms of their own ideological

interests, but it's important to remember who they replaced.

So Roberts replaces Rehnquist.

Rehnquist, he saw a lot of his Conservative vision realized

while he was on the Court, but he was constrained by the folks

he had around him, one of whom was Sandra Day O'Connor.

And so, O'Connor being replaced by Alito,

it allows Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia to pull the

Court, and pull the Conservative bloc closer to them.

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In 1997, there's a case called "Printz versus the United

States," and this is a case about the Brady Bill's

background checks.

Clarence Thomas writes a concurring opinion,

in which he says, "I know we're not taking up the Second

Amendment issue today, but I hope that,

in the future, this Court will recognize the importance of the

Second Amendment as an individual right."

In 1997, they don't have enough votes on the Court

for that view.

But by the time Roberts replaces Rehnquist and Alito replaces

O'Connor, they're in a position where they're able to

effectively revolutionize our understanding

of the Second Amendment.

Perhaps unbelievably, the Supreme Court has never

upheld an individual right to own a gun in America.

That may be about to change.

The Court has agreed to hear the case of Dick Heller,

who's challenging the 31-year-old ban on owning

handguns in the District of Columbia.

For much of our history,

the Second Amendment wasn't really litigated.

There were very few federal gun laws,

so it's not as if there were a lot of challenges and people

said, "Well, the Second Amendment doesn't apply here" or

"This is fine."

There just were not a lot of cases addressing it.

The Second Amendment, for over 200 years,

had been understood to protect basically state militias from

being disarmed by the federal government.

The only really big Supreme Court case for the first 150

years of American history

was United States versus Miller in 1939.

This is an individual who is indicted for violating a federal

law requiring you to register your firearms,

and he said, "No, this law violates my Second Amendment

rights!"

And the Supreme Court said, "No, the Second Amendment is about a

militia, and there's no evidence that your gun ownership had any

relationship to service in a well-regulated militia,

so you lose," and it was a unanimous and short opinion.

In the 1980s, among various goals and projects of the

Conservative Legal Movement is

reimagining what the Second Amendment is about in a way that

aligns more with what the NRA has begun to advocate.

It's not about state militias, it's about individual rights to

keep and carry guns for self-defense purposes.

It's a petition in support of the Second Amendment,

because I feel like our freedoms are being taken away one by one.

Former Chief Justice Warren Burger famously described

the transformation in the public's understanding of the

Second Amendment in this pretty memorable way:

This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of

fraud... I repeat the word "fraud"...

on the American public

by special interest groups

that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

When John Ashcroft is the Attorney General,

he issues a memo in 2001 that basically announces that it is

now the position of the Department of Justice that the

Second Amendment protects an individual right

to keep and bear arms.

Emboldened by Ashcroft's move,

the NRA says it will now challenge gun laws already on

the books, including the strictest of them all:

the District of Columbia's virtual ban on handguns.

Heller was definitely the big case of the term.

The question was whether that DC law violated

the Second Amendment.

If it is limited to state militias,

why would they say "The right of the people?"

Justice Stevens felt very strongly that the settled

understanding of the Second Amendment was the correct one,

and he did something quite unusual after the provisional

votes were cast in conference.

He said, "We're gonna try to get our dissent drafted and

circulated before Justice Scalia circulates his majority opinion,

and I think we might be able to pick up a vote."

And so, we got to work writing an unbelievably fast

dissent.

And then, we waited, and we waited.

But the potential memo saying "I've changed my mind,

I'd like to join your dissent" just never materialized.

It was a five-to-four ruling,

Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts,

Scalia, and Thomas in the majority.

The decision is a huge victory for advocates of gun

rights, and for Dick Heller of Washington DC,

who challenged the city's strict ban on handguns.

And I'm very happy that now, I'm able to defend myself and my

household in my own home.

Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer both wrote

dissents.

They were both fantastically brilliant justices and did good

jobs on the dissent, although I thought they were both wrong.

Justice Scalia walked through the text very carefully,

the historical antecedent of the Second Amendment,

contemporaneous understandings of the Second Amendment by legal

scholars at the time it was ratified,

and reached the conclusion that it was meant to protect an

individual right.

You start with the text; where the text is clear,

you...

you're bound.

It's not up to you to decide, "Oh,

what broad purposes did they have in mind?

Oh, they wanted a, you know, a happy society.

What would make a happy society today?

Oh, well, then we'll do that!"

That's... that's no way. I mean...

I hate to tell you the actual quote that you started to give.

"When the text is clear, you follow the text."

That's the first half.

I think I read somewhere that the person who started with that

quote... which you used...

is Portalis, who wrote the French Civil Code.

And he started by saying,

"When the text is clear, you follow the text.

But when the text isn't clear,

you"... and it's never clear, believe me...

"you look to...

"When it's not clear, you look to the values and purposes that

lie beneath."

That's true of the French system.

And it's true of the American system.

Senator Obama, you used to be a professor of law.

When you look at what makes a great Supreme Court justice,

it's not just the particular issue and how they ruled,

but it's their conception of the Court.

And part of the role of the Court is that it is gonna

protect people who may be vulnerable in the political

process... the outsider, the minority,

those who are vulnerable, those who don't have a lot of clout.

The 2008 election was, in many ways,

a referendum on the George W. Bush presidency...

a sense that it'd gone off the rails with Iraq,

with the handling of Katrina,

with a variety of issues.

The one that put it, I think, in the clearest relief

was the 2008 financial meltdown...

a sense that the pro-business policies of the Bush

Administration had finally come home to roost.

They weren't solely to blame for this...

there had been changes made in the Clinton Administration too

but the election very much came to be a fight over that one

issue, which was dominating the headlines during the final

stretches of the campaign.

Exciting music

And CNN can now project that Barack Obama,

47 years old, will become the President-Elect

of the United States.

It is my great personal honor

to present the 44th President of these United States,

Barack Obama!

When President Obama was sworn in,

my mom said, "I wish your dad could see this."

And I told her, "He sees it.

He's watching."

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George W. Bush didn't have a Supreme Court appointment until

his second term.

Barack Obama has one almost right away.

President Obama's first two nominations were important,

of course, but didn't fundamentally change the balance

on the Court.

Justice Sotomayor he nominated to replace Justice Souter...

I have decided to nominate an inspiring woman,

who I believe will make a great justice,

Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

President Obama had every reason to think that she would

get big bi-partisan support as Stephen Breyer had,

as Ruth Bader Ginsburg had...

but she got fewer than 10 Republican votes

for her confirmation.

And the same thing happened with Elena Kagan.

I think she got only five or seven Republican votes.

We've reached this point of political polarization

that has

obviously dramatically affected the confirmation process,

and it's hard to imagine that going away any time soon.

The Court, in terms of Obama's nominees,

isn't ideologically changing; it's a kind of consistent

center-right-with-some-liberal- outcomes court,

where there are still justices up for grabs.

And so, you get decisions like Obergefell,

the decision written by Justice Kennedy

in which the Court decided that the Constitution protected the

right of individuals to marry the person of their choice,

whatever their gender.

All Americans have the right to marry.

A historic day at the Supreme Court;

justices find equal treatment under the law for same-sex

couples.

It will now be the law everywhere in the United States.

The Supreme Court ruled five to four today that same-sex couples

have the right to marry, and the remaining 14 states have to drop

their bans on the practice.

Tender music

I think it's really hard to put Justice Kennedy's philosphy into

any one sentence; he really is such a different justice

depending on the case.

In one set of cases, he is leading the charge to expand

protections for same-sex couples,

for same-sex partners.

In another set of cases, he's agreeing with paring back the

Voting Rights Act.

It's not that he's a Moderate,

it's that, if you average out how far to the left he is on

some issues and how far to the right he is on others,

he ends up in the middle overall.

But it's a different Kennedy depending upon which set of

cases we're talking about.

Today, the US Supreme Court announced that

they're gonna hear a challenge to the Voting Rights Act...

to the central part of it.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Shelby County, Alabama,

just outside Birmingham.

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In the Civil Rights legal community,

we regard the Voting Rights Act as maybe the most consequential

and successful civil rights statute.

It's got many different components that are designed to

protect the rights of Black people and language minorities

to participate equally in the political process,

but perhaps the most unique aspect of it was contained in

Section 5.

It essentially required the jurisdictions that had records

of discrimination in voting to ask permission from the federal

government in order to

make any changes to their voting laws.

And this process was called "pre-clearance;"

you had to get the voting change pre-cleared.

"Explain to us what his impact will be on your Black population

or your Latino population.

Convince us that it's not retrogressive."

And that was the single thing that was most important in

changing the balance of power just so that everybody got a

fair voice in these states of the old Confederacy that had,

for decades and decades, had almost no Black people voting in

them at all.

And the Voting Rights Act had overwhelming support every time

the statute was reauthorized.

President Nixon today signed into the law the bill

which extends the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

I'm very pleased to sign today H.R.6219,

which extends the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I am pleased today to sign the

legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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The Pledge of Allegiance today will be offered by the

gentlewoman from Michigan, Ms. Kilpatrick.

The last time the Voting Rights Act was

reauthorized was in 2006.

Congress, over the course of a year,

held multiple hearings to determine,

"Do we need to continue this pre-clearance process?"

There's no doubt in the minds of every fair-minded observer

that if Section 5 is not reauthorized,

the state of Alabama and many of its political subdivisions

will attempt rapidly to reverse

or to undermine the gains African Americans have made

under the Voting Rights Act in the last few decades.

There were tens of thousands of pages of evidence gathered by

Congress in 2006

to show, in Congress' judgement, that the risk of discrimination

in voting in the states that were covered by Section 5

remained very serious.

But the sad fact is, the sad truth is

discrimination still exists!

And that's why we still need the Voting Rights Act,

and we must not go back to the dark past!

Those in favor will vote "Aye."

Those opposed will say "No."

The yeas are 390, the nays are 33.

The resolution has passed the House.

Thank you, good morning, welcome.

Today, we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the

margins into the life of American democracy.

My administration will vigorously enforce the

provisions of this law, and we will defend it in court.

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Though Shelby County was a county in Alabama that was

one of those jurisdictions that needed to submit any voting

changes to the federal government before that those

could go into effect,

that county sued the federal government.

The challenge in Shelby County was whether the most recent

extension of the provisions of the Voting Rights Act

were lawful.

There are two laws that work together; Section 4 is

the law that says which states are covered by the pre-clearance

obligation, and there was a whole formula.

And the argument that was made was that that formula is too old

and that, you know, now that Black people are voting in much

greater numbers in the South,

the fact that they weren't able to vote in 1965 isn't a good

enough reason to have Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas

still have to go up and get pre-clearance.

The Shelby County versus Holder case came

before the DC Circuit.

I was on a panel with two other judges.

In the 15th Amendment, Congress is given broad power to regulate

elections to make certain that they're free of racism.

So both Judge Tatel and I thought that Congress was acting

well within its authority to do that.

And ultimately, that got appealed to the Supreme Court.

The argument sharply divided the justices.

The Court's Conservative majority appeared poised to

strike down at least part of the act,

and eliminate the current federal oversight of voting

in the South.

We ask for some recognition that... that we and these other

covered jurisdictions have made great strides over the last

48 years.

General, is it the government's

submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than

citizens in the North?

It is not,

and I do not know the answer to that, Your Honor,

but I do think it was reasonable for...

Well, which is it:

it is not and you don't know the answer answer to it?

I... I...

It's not our submission.

As an objective matter, I don't know the answer

to that question.

Whenever a society adopts racial

entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them

through the normal political processes.

I don't think there is anything to be gained

by any senator

to vote against continuation of this act.

And I am fairly confident it will be re-enacted in

perpetuity, unless a court can say,

"It does not comport with the Constitution."

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Roberts, writing for the majority in Shelby County,

held that this provision of the Voting Rights Act

unconstitutional.

The decision by the Court today is a game-changer,

and leaves virtually unprotected minority voters in communities

all over this country.

As Chief Justice John Roberts said,

"Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically."

Ruth Ginsburg, in her dissenting opinion,

characterized Roberts' opinion as someone thinking,

"In the pouring rain, I don't need an umbrella anymore 'cause

I'm not getting wet," and throwing the umbrella away.

The great man who led the march from Selma

to Montgomery

and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act

foresaw progress, even in Alabama.

"The arc of the moral universe is long," he said.

"But it bends toward justice,

if there is a steadfast commitment

to see the task

through

to completion."

That commitment has been disserved

by today's decision.

Soft tense music

The minute that the Supreme Court invalidated

the pre-clearance regime meant that a lot of discriminatory

laws could now go into effect

without the federal government having the authority or power to

stop them.

So we're living in a vastly different world post-Shelby.

Within hours, officials from southern jurisdictions were

exclaiming their excitement at their freedom now to pass any

voting law they wanted.

We have been faced, as voting rights advocates,

with a deluge of anti-voter bills

every legislative cycle.

We have rolled back the clock

to the pre-1965 period.

The Court played a huge role in the 1960s of holding America to

this ideal of democracy,

and we still fell short, right?

Democracy is always a work in progress.

They continue to have a very important role as we move into a

period where I think we're facing

a different kind of crisis for democracy,

which is whether or not people will continue to play

by the rules.

It's campaign season... we're right in the middle of it...

and one of the most important issues now is this:

Who will Americans trust to nominate the next

Supreme Court justice?

It is time

to show the whole world

that America is back, bigger and better

and stronger

than ever before!

We are going to appoint justices

of the United States Supreme Court

who will uphold our laws

and our Constitution!

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