Grassley Statement at Executive Business Meeting on DOJ Nominees, Police Week Legislation
Prepared Statement by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee
Executive Business Meeting
Thursday, May 13, 2021
I’ll be voting for Todd Kim to head the
environment division. I don’t think I agree with him on a lot of issues and I
certainly don’t agree with President Biden’s environmental policies. But I
think he’s well qualified to run environmental enforcement at the Justice
Department. He won’t be making policy; he’ll be enforcing the law. I trust
he’ll do so in a fair and even-handed way.
I won’t be supporting Kristen Clarke to
run the Civil Rights Division. I want to explain why. Ms. Clarke is a good
attorney, but I believe she continues the disturbing trend of highly
politicized nominees to the Justice Department under President Biden. While I
disagree with her strongly on some of her views, especially when it comes to
defunding the police and her activist activities in college and law school,
that disagreement alone doesn’t explain my ‘no’ vote.
The Department of Justice, and especially
the Civil Rights Division, needs to be committed to impartial and equal justice
for all. In the wrong hands it’s a division that can be used to target the president’s
political opponents, like law enforcement, school-choice advocates, religious
schools, red states or pro-lifers. Our civil rights laws are broad and even the
threat of their enforcement can chill legitimate political opposition.
Unfortunately, Ms. Clarke is a partisan.
She opposed the enforcement of voting rights laws against Ike Brown, either
because of the color of his skin or because of his political party. Neither
answer is acceptable. She has disparaged religious freedom groups, Supreme Court
decisions protecting religious liberty, individual Supreme Court Justices and
some of my colleagues on Twitter. She has held Republican nominees to standards
she doesn’t want applied to herself.
Many of my colleagues have also expressed
concern about Ms. Clarke’s candor in answering our questions. To an extent, I
share this concern. I asked Ms. Clarke whether Mumia Abdul Jamal, the country’s
most notorious cop killer, was a political prisoner. She wouldn’t answer,
telling me that she was unfamiliar with his case. Given her youthful activism,
I find that very hard to believe. To paraphrase a colleague of mine, there has
to be a less-partisan, more candid nominee to lead the Civil Rights Division.
So unfortunately I’m a no on Ms. Clarke.
Let
me mention the bills on the agenda today. The Klobuchar-Grassley Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act will
help boost enforcement resources for the Justice Department’s Antitrust
Division and the Federal Trade Commission. The bill adjusts merger filing fees
so that fees would be shouldered by larger transactions in a more equitable
manner. I hope that my colleagues will support this bill.
Mr.
Chairman, I want to thank you for holding a police week markup. Every year at
this time we get the opportunity to show our appreciation to America’s law
enforcement community for the work they do keeping us safe. Today, we’ll be
marking up three bills for Police Week. I’m proud to cosponsor all of them.
One
of those bills is S.1502, the Confidentiality
Opportunities for Peer Support Counseling Act. This bill protects
information shared by law enforcement officers during their peer-support
counseling sessions. Another bill is S.1511, the Protecting America’s First Responders Act. This bill ensures that
fallen and severely disabled public safety officers get the compensation they
are entitled to from the Public Safety Officers Benefit program. We also have
Senator Cornyn’s bill, S.921, the Jaime
Zapata and Victor Avila Federal Officers and Employees Protection Act of 2021,
which many of us have cosponsored. That bill lets courts across the country
know that they have jurisdiction over criminals who kill U.S. law enforcement
officers overseas. Some federal courts have understood this to be the law
already – but not all of them. This bill makes Congress’s intention clear, to
protect our federal officers.
I do
want to say that police officers are suffering from not only violent attacks
directed at them because of the uniform they wear, but also demoralization and
fatigue. Over the last year, police officers began quitting the force in large
numbers, and police departments have struggled to attract enough applicants to
fill out the next generation of law enforcement. I worry that more and more
police officers won’t want to do the job. And I worry that more and more young
adults won’t want to start careers in law enforcement. We need more qualified
people who want to be police officers, not fewer.
It’s
nice to work in a bipartisan way during Police Week for our officers. The past
year has been a difficult one for them, and their services have been
instrumental in protecting our communities during what has been a very trying
time for us all.
-30-
