The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Nomination of Kristen M. Clarke (Executive Session)” mentioning Raphael G. Warnock was published in the Senate section on pages S3390-S3392 on May 25.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Nomination of Kristen M. Clarke
Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, it is a real honor to be rising today to speak in advance of the vote on Kristen Clarke's nomination to serve as the Attorney General of the Department of Justice.
If she is confirmed, Kristen Clarke will be tasked with overseeing the Justice Department's work to protect the civil rights of all Americans.
I have known Kristen Clarke for years. I have worked with her. I know her, and I can tell you that there can be no one better for this job.
To say that Kristen Clarke has an impressive resume is a gross understatement. She started her career at the Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division. She worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She led the Civil Rights Bureau for the State of New York Attorney General's Office and most recently served as president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
No one could blame Kristen Clarke, after this entire career of service and all that she has given, if she decided to take a step back and find a less demanding job, perhaps a far more lucrative job. But Ms. Clarke has dedicated herself to the highest principles of our Nation--indeed, to the founding ideals of our country, formed with the Bill of Rights, focusing on this idea of civil rights for all.
This is not just her job. This has been her calling. This is her consistent conviction--to serve, to sacrifice for our Nation's most sacrosanct ideals.
She has chosen to serve this country now at a time when we need her leadership more than ever. She is an asset to our country, and I believe she will serve with extraordinary distinction as a guardian of our civil rights.
We need her experience. We need her expertise. We need her heart, her commitment, her deep thoughtfulness
She is the daughter of immigrants, and after growing up in public housing, in a low-income household, Ms. Clarke made it to some of our most prestigious institutions and made it her cause to make the best out of herself. She is an incredible success story. She is a person who has overcome tremendous odds and advanced herself, not just for personal excellence but for public service. This makes her, in my book, a champion.
Yet there are still those in this confirmation process who want to say that Ms. Clarke is the wrong person for the job. They are actually using smear tactics and lies to try to misrepresent who Ms. Clarke is as a person. There is a saying, ``Let the work I have done speak for me,'' and I wish folk would listen.
She has prosecuted hate crimes. She has defended people's voting rights. She has fought against religious discrimination. She has dedicated her career to the cause of equal justice under law.
Ms. Clarke is the right person for this job. She is exactly who we need. At a time when we are confronting rising hate crimes in America, dramatically more instances of vandalism and violence against Asian Americans, against Jewish Americans, against transgender Americans, we need someone leading the Civil Rights Division who will stand up for all Americans, who has experience prosecuting hate crimes and makes it clear in this Nation that all are created equal and endowed by their Creator with fundamental civil rights. That is who she is now and who she has been for her entire career.
There are folks and forces working to strip away and weaken and undermine these fundamental rights. We see efforts to weaken our democracy, to threaten our principles. We need someone who will stand up and affirm who we are as a people--a nation that believes in robust voting rights, a nation that believes in the equal dignity of all people, a nation that believes in protecting religious liberty. We need a champion now as much as ever. We need Kristen Clarke leading the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.
And it is not just me saying that. It is just not Democrats saying that. There are over 70 bipartisan former State attorneys general. We see police leaders, law enforcement leaders endorsing her, prosecutors endorsing her, the Anti-Defamation League and 69 different local, State, and national Jewish organizations, all agreeing that Kristen Clarke is the right person to stand for us, to work for us, to fight for us, to champion for our precious civil rights at the Department of Justice.
So many different individuals from all across the political landscape, from all different backgrounds, and so many organizations representing all of our diversity are speaking out in a chorus of conviction about not just how good Kristen Clarke is but how urgent her nomination is because of who she has shown herself to be time and again: an unassailable, impressive career of service, service, service. She is and has been a servant leader for all of her career; a person of profound integrity; someone whose passion, whose sacrifice, whose struggle in the pursuit of justice has already made this Nation better.
I will say something on a personal note in closing. I have worked with Kristen Clarke for years now on things that we have done together, like a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill.
I had the occasion years ago of meeting her when she was out in Washington with her son. He was a young guy, not that tall. Then, during her hearings in the Judiciary Committee, I saw her again present herself in an extraordinarily powerful manner, with grace and expertise, but I saw that young man now had grown up. He is a big guy. And it would be a leap of ego for me to say that I saw myself in this young man because he is probably a lot smarter than I was when I was his age and clearly is a better athlete, even though I will say for the record that the older I get, the better I am in sports.
But I think about her career, and then I align it to what she has done in raising a young Black man in America. While I couldn't project myself onto him, I thought a lot about my mom in her. My mom raised my brother and me in a nation that strove to be who we say we are, a nation of liberty and justice for all. But where she knew we were falling short, she didn't raise us to be bitter; she raised us to be better. She raised us by setting an example, a woman who--from sitting in at a lunch counter to desegregate a restaurant, to helping organize the March on Washington, she showed me by example. As James Baldwin has said, children are never good at listening to their elders, but they never fail to imitate them.
I want you all to know that in Kristen Clarke, we have an extraordinary American, an extraordinary person, and a great mom. And I know what she has done with her life. She has lived perhaps with the greatest principle of all, which is for us in this generation to make a better way for the next, for us to make a more perfect Union, for us to understand that the arc of the moral universe is indeed long but we must bend it more towards justice.
I tell my colleagues and urge you to confirm her to this sacrosanct and urgent position today because I am confident to the core of my being that she will not just make us proud, she will not just defend those who are having their rights trampled or their dignity marginalized, but that she will make a better way for an America that fulfills its promise, still not yet achieved, for us to be a nation with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, here we go again. Just a few weeks ago, the Senate debated Vanita Gupta's nomination for Associate Attorney General, so let's review the bidding from that.
Gupta was eminently qualified for her role. She had support from the foremost law enforcement leaders and groups in the country. She had proven herself handling high-level government responsibilities. But Republicans set their hair on fire trying to take Ms. Gupta down. They grasped for something, anything, to dent her prospects. Eventually they landed on contorting an 8-year-old op-ed, even calling her accurate responses to their questions about it lies. It wasn't pretty.
Now we are back on the floor with Republican hair aflame again, this time over the nominee to run the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke. Like Ms. Gupta, Ms. Clarke is eminently qualified. She knows civil rights law inside and out. She has run one of the Nation's leading civil rights organizations. She is a superb, well-trained, experienced lawyer.
Conservatives have endorsed her, like President George W. Bush's DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. Law enforcement organizations like the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police support her.
She ought to have flown through committee and been a quick vote here on the floor, but, no, it is hair-on-fire time again. Why all the coifs aflame? Look behind the smokescreens and remember that the No. 1 strategy of the Republican Party for 2022 is to keep voters from voting. And guess what. Ms. Clarke will run the voting rights section of the Department, and Ms. Gupta, who used to run that same Civil Rights Division, will supervise her as Assistant Attorney General.
Behind the ruckus over Ms. Gupta and now Ms. Clarke is a dark money operation out to suppress the vote. It has the trade craft of a covert operation--cutouts, front groups, secret money--and that covert operation is now focused on preventing, as our colleague Senator Warnock says, ``some people'' from voting. And Ms. Clarke and Ms. Gupta will be the lawful, legal opposition to the dark money, voter-
suppression apparatus.
Here is what we know. When Trump was in power, this covert op ran a dark money-funded apparatus within the Federalist Society to select Federal judges. For 4 years, the Federalist Society's operation was the gatekeeper to the Federal bench. Virtually every judicial candidate who passed through this dark money-funded turnstile was approved by big, anonymous donors out to control the courts. Donors got to approve judges and Justices who would have their backs.
That dark money turnstile was step 1. Step 2 was dark money-funded political campaigns for Senate confirmation of the nominees who got through the turnstile. For Trump's three Supreme Court nominees, this was done by the Judicial Crisis Network, headquartered literally down the hall from the Federalist Society--not just the same building, the same hallway, but they also share staff. In each Supreme Court confirmation, a $15 million or a $17 million check from a secret donor would fund the advertising campaign.
Step 3 is dark money-funded front organizations appearing before the donor-selected Justices in orchestrated flotillas with common donors behind them, undisclosed to the Court.
When Trump lost, of course, step 1 and step 2 lost their salience and closed up shop. But with Trump judges still on the court, these front groups are still at it. In one case before the Supreme Court right now, 50 organizations--50 organizations--that filed briefs received funding through rightwing groups involved in this operation.
Dark money funding can't be traced back to its original donors, obviously, because it is dark money, but a 2019 Washington Post investigation revealed that one guy, Leonard Leo, while executive vice president of the Federalist Society, from 2014 to 2017 coordinated $250 million--a quarter of a billion dollars--across a network of the front groups engaged in this court capture operation. Recent testimony in my Courts Subcommittee raised that number to over $400 million--nearly half a billion dollars--through 2018. Four hundred million is a lot of money, but a captured court, that is a pearl beyond price.
This Leo operation worked wonderfully during the Trump Presidency. Donors got their judges. Judicial Crisis Network and Leonard Leo got their dark money. But then that Post investigation came out, and Trump's polling started to tank. So, like a burned agent, Leonard Leo bugged out.
Where did he bug out to? Well, Leo surfaced early last year with a group called the Honest Elections Project. These phony-baloney front groups love to have the name that is the exact opposite of what they are actually doing. So this one is called the Honest Elections Project, and it has been running voter suppression activities in key battleground States, sending threatening letters to local election officials, and filing lawsuits to restrict voting--and, of course, all dark money-funded.
But poke a little further and you discover that the Honest Elections Project is a legal alias of something called the Judicial Education Project, which is--you guessed it--the sister group to Judicial Crisis Network--yep, Leo's judicial confirmation attack-ad organization. And, of course, behind this covert op was dark money, much of it run through DonorsTrust, the identity-laundering, dark money ATM established by the Kochs' donor network. Before it took on this Honest Elections Project alias, more than 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project's 2018 revenue was a single, anonymous $7.8 million donation that came through, of course, DonorsTrust. There is no way to know who cut that check
What does all this dark money finagling and front group subterfuge tell us? As a reporter for the Guardian observed, the Honest Elections Project, so-called, melds two goals of the rightwing dark money operation: One, pack the Federal judiciary, and two, bring voting rights cases before the packed courts. Rigging elections by keeping
``some people'' from voting is now a Republican priority, and if Trump judges will help, so much the better.
Just recently, we actually learned more about the covert voter suppression operation. The watchdog group Documented and the magazine Mother Jones uncovered a video of a presentation by the dark money group Heritage Action to its top donors. In the video, the presenter brags about getting what she called ``key provisions''--``key provisions''--into voter suppression legislation in dozens of capitals around the country.
She tells the donors, and I am quoting here, ``In some cases, we actually draft them for them''--they actually draft the laws for the State legislatures--``or,'' she said, ``we have a sentinel''--a sentinel; what a creepy word--``we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-
up type of vibe.'' Big donors love that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.
There is lots of dark money that fuels this covert op. Heritage Action says it plans to spend $24 million in eight battleground States to ``create an echo chamber'' of relentless lobbying for voter suppression bills. They say they will be coordinating with known Koch network groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks.
This operation is the kind of stuff that we might want our intelligence services to do in enemy countries to create disruption and discord and provide secret influence. The idea that creepy billionaires are running covert operations in and against our own country, that ought to make you cringe.
Not only is this behavior morally corrupt, it may have broken rules. One State legislature has already floated an ethics probe into Heritage Action's sentinels jamming phony bills through their chamber.
So back to Senate Republicans getting their hair on fire over Kristen Clarke and Vanita Gupta. These two women scare the daylights out of this dark money operation behind Republican voter suppression. Ms. Clarke knows the Voting Rights Act cold; she won voting rights cases against voter suppression laws all over the country. Put Jim Crow 2.0 up against a Department of Justice Civil Rights Division led by Kristen Clarke, and that dark money voter suppression operation has a problem. So the big dark money donors behind this covert operation will raise whatever ruckus they can--first, to try to stop Vanita Gupta, which didn't work, and now to stop Kristen Clarke, which won't work--all in an effort to protect their dark money scheme to prevent some people from voting. You have to look behind the smokescreen sometimes to understand what is going on. It is not pretty, but it is the truth.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to conclude my remarks before the vote begins.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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