Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday regarding the Senate vote on the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit:

“Today the Senate will vote on the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. I will be opposing the nominee. I’d like to explain why.
 
“First and foremost is Ms. Halligan’s record of advocacy for an activist view of the judiciary, and a legal career that leads any reasonable person to conclude that she would bring that activism to the court. As I’ve said many times before, the proper role of a judge is that of the impartial arbiter who gives everybody a fair shake under the law. The role of a judge in our system, in other words, is to determine what the law says, not what they or anybody else wants it to.

“Yet looking over Ms. Halligan’s record, it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t share that view. In Ms. Halligan’s view, the courts aren’t so much a forum for the even-handed application of the law as a place where a judge can work out his or her own idea of what society should look like. As she once put it, the courts are a means to achieve ‘social progress’, with judges presumably writing the script.
 
“Well, my own view is that if the American people want to change the law, then they’ve got elected representatives to do that, accountable to them. This also happens to be how the Founders intended it.  And it’s what the American people expect of their judges: fair, impartial arbiters. But that’s not what they would get from a Judge Halligan.
 
“How do we know this?
 
“Well, it’s true that like many of this President’s other judicial nominees, Ms. Halligan repudiated President Obama’s own oft-stated ‘empathy standard’ for choosing judges, and disclaimed an activist bent in her confirmation hearing.  But her record belies this now-familiar confirmation conversion.
 
“Let’s just take a quick look at her record to see what it does suggest about the kind of judge she’d be.
 
“On the Second Amendment:  As solicitor general of New York, Ms. Halligan advanced the dubious legal theory that those who make firearms should be liable for third parties who misuse them criminally. The state court in New York rejected the theory, noting that it had never recognized such a novel claim. Moreover, the court called what Ms. Halligan wanted it to do to manufacturers of a legal product ‘legally inappropriate.’

“Let me say that again, the New York appellate court termed Ms. Halligan’s activist and novel legal theory to be ‘legally inappropriate.’ The Congress passed legislation on a wide, bipartisan basis to stop these sorts of lawsuits because they were an abuse of the legal process.

“Undeterred, Ms. Halligan then chose to file an amicus brief in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in another frivolous case against firearms manufacturers. Not surprisingly, she lost that case, too.
 
“On enemy combatants:  In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that the President has the legal authority to detain as enemy combatants individuals who are associated with AQ.  Yet despite this ruling, Ms. Halligan filed an amicus brief years later arguing that the President did not possess this legal authority.
 
“On abortion:  Ms. Halligan filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that pro-life protestors had engaged in ‘extortion’ within the meaning of federal law.  The Supreme Court roundly rejected this legal theory, 8-1.
 
“On immigration: Ms. Halligan chose to file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that the National Labor Relations Board should have the legal authority to grant back pay to illegal aliens, even though federal law prohibits illegal aliens from working in the United States in the first place. Fortunately the court sided with the law and disagreed with Ms. Halligan on that legal theory, too.

“The point here is that even in cases where the law was perfectly clear, or the courts had already spoken, including the Supreme Court, Ms. Halligan chose to get involved anyway, using arguments that had already been rejected either by the courts, the legislature, or, in the case of frivolous claims against the gun manufacturers, by both.
 
“In other words, Ms. Halligan has time and again sought to push her own views over and above those of the courts or those of the people, as reflected in the law. Ms. Halligan’s record strongly suggests that she wouldn’t view a seat on the U.S. Appeals Court as an opportunity to adjudicate, even-handedly, disputes between parties based on the law, but instead as an opportunity to put her thumb on the scale in favor of whatever individual or group or cause she happens to believe in.

“We shouldn’t be putting activists on the bench.
 
“I have nothing against this nominee personally.

“I just believe, as I think most other Americans do, that we should be putting people on the bench who are committed to an even-handed interpretation of the law, so everyone who walks into a courtroom knows he or she will have a fair shake. In my view, Ms. Halligan is not such a nominee.
 
“On the contrary, based on her record and her past statements, I think she would use the court to put her activist judicial philosophy into practice, and for that reason alone she shouldn’t be confirmed. So I’ll be voting against cloture on this nomination. I urge my colleagues to do the same.”