Madam President, I am confident the Presiding Officer is familiar with the phrase, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that from his jail cell in Birmingham. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
I rise to talk about justice and the budgetary choices Congress is making that impact the ability of the American people to access the justice promised them by our Constitution.
Our federal courts translate laws into justice and effective courts require fair judges, well-trained lawyers, and efficient clerks. As the Presiding Officer well knows, the fewer judges and clerks we have and the reduced resources in time-saving technology, the fewer cases can be handled at a time, and the longer cases will take to process. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
Of course, staffing the courts costs money, but when we compare it to the rest of the federal government, this whole branch is a relative bargain. For every $100 spent by our federal government, just 19 cents goes to the entire federal court system. We actually spend more every month on the ongoing conduct of operations in Afghanistan than we do in an entire year on the whole federal court system. It is, relatively speaking, a bargain.
With caseloads growing and budgets shrinking, though, the federal courts have been cutting back where they could for years now, methodically looking for ways to cut costs, reduce overhead, lower personnel, and generally be more efficient. They are both metaphorically and literally looking under every cushion for coins, looking for ways to cut costs, reduce overhead, lower their personnel costs, whatever they can do to keep up.
Then came the sequester. Of course, when it was first conceived, the sequester was designed to be so reckless, so dangerous that it would drive Congress back to the negotiating table — House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats – to confront our nation’s annual deficits and craft a bipartisan agreement. But, sadly, it failed. Congress as a whole failed, and the across-the-board spending cuts engineered in the sequester went into effect.
It has been almost 7 months since they came into effect and, in that time, I have heard from hundreds of Delawareans, as I am sure all the Members have heard from their constituents, directly impacted by the sequester. I have spoken with dumbfounded employees at Dover Air Force Base — more than 1,000 hard-working Delawareans, many of them veterans who can’t believe that they individually are paying the price because Congress, House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, can’t craft a responsible deal.
Kevin from Magnolia asked me: Why are my family and I being punished with a 20-percent pay cut this quarter? Bryan from Houston — both towns in Delaware — said he was tired of being the one to suffer the consequences because, in his view, Congress can’t get the budgetary job done.
My heart goes out to Kevin and Bryan and every Delawarean who has called my office, written to me, and talked to me about the sequester. I agree with them. It needs to be replaced responsibly and urgently. As a member of the Budget Committee, I have worked with my colleagues to craft a budget that would replace the sequester in a way that is in keeping with our core values and the priority of investing in America’s future.
Not many people, though, are talking about how the sequester is impacting our courts. We hear about how sequester is affecting defense. We hear about how it is affecting research, and infrastructure, but our courts have often gone without consideration. There is no natural constituency, bluntly, that feels slighted; the number of furloughed employees is relatively small and there is no real lobby in Washington for the health of our courts.
But the sequester’s impact on the federal courts affects all of us — every single American. The sequester is slowing the pace, increasing the cost, and eroding the quality of the delivery of justice in this country.
At the end of our last session, I chaired a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts that looked at how the sequester is impacting the public defender service in our Nation’s courts. These courts have been forced to cut past the fat and well into muscle and soon into bone.
The Judiciary has looked at a variety of measures to address this new budgetary reality and very few of them come without significant pain to the businesses, individuals, and communities that rely on our courts. One proposal — to simply not schedule civil jury trials in September — would effectively impose a 30-day uncertainty tax on everyone. A judge in Nebraska has threatened to dismiss low-priority immigration status crimes because of a lack of adequate capacity. In New York, deep furlough cuts to the public defender’s office caused the delay of the criminal trial for Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and former Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith.
In my home State of Delaware, sequester has meant lengthy employee furloughs at the clerk’s office of the bankruptcy court, reduced investments in IT, and postponed essential upgrades. Simply put, the financial state of our federal courts erodes our fundamental constitutional rights. Individuals depend on the courts to be there when they need them, to seek relief from discrimination, to resolve commercial disputes, to allow parties to stop fighting and get to work growing the economy or to guarantee fairness and efficiency in criminal proceedings.
The reality is our federal courts were already stretched thin before this sequester.
Chief Justice Roberts leads the Judiciary Conference of the United States. The Judicial Conference was created by Congress to administer the federal court system and work with Congress to ensure appropriations keep up with the needs of our courts. The Judicial Conference is and always has been nonpartisan.
Earlier this year, the Judiciary Conference sent Chairman Leahy and me a letter recommending that in order for the courts to fulfill their missions, we must add federal judges to the bench. In the last two decades, since the last comprehensive judgeship bill — 23 years, to be precise —Article III district courts have seen their caseloads grow nearly 40 percent. Yet the number of judges has grown by four. Today, judges in the Eastern District of California, long recognized as one of the most overburdened in the nation, face over 1,000 weighted case filings per judge. In the District of Columbia, case filings were over 1,500 per judge. The Judicial Conference generally believes that additional judgeships are needed when there are more than 500 per judge. So even before the sequester, our courts weren’t keeping up with their caseloads.
Heeding the recommendations we received last month, Chairman Leahy and I introduced the Federal Judgeship Act of 2013, which will create 91 new federal judgeships, 2 federal circuits, and 32 judicial districts across 21 states. This bill would provide much needed relief to our overburdened courts, ensuring they are better prepared to administer justice quickly and efficiently.
Again, this proposal, this bill, is in direct response to the analytical work of the nonpartisan Judicial Conference. This change is long overdue. Congress has not comprehensively addressed judicial staffing levels since 1990 — 23 years ago — and the trial court weighted filings per judgeship have risen from 386 back then to 520 today. Those national figures actually mask even more dramatic circumstances faced by the most burdened districts in Texas, Delaware, and California.
Yesterday, I chaired a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts to consider this Act and, during this hearing, District Court Judge Sue Robinson of Delaware testified on the need for more judgeships. She explained that “despite all the additional technologies we have, and an excellent staff, there is nothing more I can do at this point with respect to getting my cases resolved timely.” At that hearing, I appreciated and was encouraged by the statement of my colleague from Alabama that, in fact, the District of Delaware deserves another judge due to its incredible caseload. I would argue, though, and the evidence suggests, that the need is not confined to my State but to districts all across the country. We need to take on the whole problem, not just a small piece of it. Nobody wants to be in a courtroom, but when you need to be in court it is because something significant has happened in your life and you don’t want a judge rushing to move on to the next thing because of a crushing caseload. You don’t want clerks so awash in paperwork that yours gets lost.
In conclusion, we need to help our judges deliver justice by replacing the sequester with a responsible, balanced approach that restores the funding taken from our courts and allows us to add the judgeships we need to keep pace with demand.
Dr. King was right: Justice too long delayed is indeed justice denied. By delaying the delivery of justice, the sequester is denying justice to too many Americans. We don’t need more delays; we need more judges, and we need to act together to get it done now.