you up at night because you re seeing the worst of humanity. these crimes are horrible. and so i take them very seriously just as i did all of the crimes, but especially crimes against children. joyce, your thoughts. i think she hits absolutely the sweet spot for having this conversation about child pornography sentencing law, which i ll tell you as a prosecutor who has both handled these cases, prosecuting them in the district court and handling them in courts of appeal, these are difficult. they re not made for television. easy sorts of conversations. this is a problem that s been brewing in the federal judiciary for at least ten or 15 years because what s happened in reality here is that laws that were written at a point in time
record makes clear, you ve demonstrated that the way you approach cases is based on the law and not on some political agenda. you understand the reason why the robes of our federal judges are black, not red or blue. the american justice system, as many have said, is rooted in the impartiality, the independence and the reliability of our federal judicial system. it is one of the most critical bulwarks of our system of ordered liberty. no wonder that when you came before this body to be confirmed for the district court and the circuit court you earned and received bipartisan support. i know president biden counts nominating a supreme court justice among the most significant decisions of his presidency, and our role here in the senate in confirming a justice to our highest court is among our most solemn obligations and greatest privileges. so in nominating you i believe our president has met his mission and it will be my honor
thorough opinions you ve written show to me a judge striving to make evenhanded decisions based on facts and law, not on some caricature of a leftist agenda. but don t just take my word for it. we ve received an outpouring of support for your nomination, as we ll hear on thursday. a very wide range of groups and individuals have sent letters or testimony to this committee in support of your nomination. it s no surprise to me that your legal mind, your experience, your temperament inspires strong support from some of the best and brightest of our legal community. and i think it is worth highlighting that among those many that have written to us are included well-respected conservative and republican lawyers and republican-appointed judges who agree with my characterization that you re an evenhanded and impartial judge. we ve received a letter from 24 conservative lawyers who held
now, the republican national committee, or the rnc, is opposing your nomination, publicly accusing you of being a partisan, of a partisan democrat. they argue you could not possibly be an impartial justice. but ironically, back in 2016 you presided over a case brought by the rnc against u.s.a.i.d. related to then presidential candidate clinton and you ruled in favor of the rnc. both the substance and the timing of the case are really quite striking. i did. the rnc made freedom of information act requests for certain e-mails involving the former secretary. and despite what the rnc would have us now believe, in this case you reinforced your deserved reputation for following the law, not a partisan agenda, because you ordered u.s.a.i.d. to produce thousands of pages of documents related to secretary clinton. do you recall when you issued that decision, that order?
sentiments you expressed in your law school note? respectfully, senator, those are not the sentiments that i expressed in my law school note. my law school note was about sex offender registration laws, which at the time were relatively new. as you know from our time in law school, one of the things that law school students do is they look for new developments in the law and they try to analyze them. that s something that makes for good fodder for a law school note. my note, which came out in 1996, was shortly after there were new megan s laws. and the point that i was making was not that the laws were bad, that the laws were wrong. i was trying to assess something that is sort of fundamental in terms of the characterization of the laws.