let me ask about domestic policy of the bush administration. a lot of people at this conference had it is not new to you. a lot of conservatives think that all the good things that the bush administration did, the one area where they could have done better was controlling government spending. they say that that undermined our brand in part because of the very bad results that we had in 2006 and 2008. you have a comment on that? >> i cannot argue completely against that. we had a republican congress for several of those years. when the question, on whether or not you had a spending bill, the response was often will you except? to vetoay you're going the bill, we will not send it to you. we will send you a different one. there was a natural inclination because we had both the white house in the house and senate. it would try to cap the notion of out and out conflict. i think that we could have done a better job on spending. i was always concerned when we got into prescription drug benefits, the original objective was that we would grant additional benefits. -- prescription drugs are the key to survival. it has to be part of the package. in return for that, with one significant reform in the medicare program. we began to get a handle on medical costs. we get the prescription drug benefit, but we never get any kind of reform. i think that the criticism has some justification. the other thing that i referenced is 9/11. it had a huge impact on what our priorities were. under 9/11, we had to undertake a lot of activity to make the nation safe. everything from setting up the homeland security department to military operations in afghanistan. there was a lot of stuff that we had to do fast. it was expensive. but i think we saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been threatened if we have responded as aggressively as we did. i am glad to see that the congress appears to be serious about going after that. >> richard from santa barbara has a question. you may want to save this for your book, also. he asks if you can give us any information on whether or not -- on your reaction when gov. bush has to to be vice-president did what can you tell us about that meeting? >> i have talked about that before. i will talk about it again. i had been approached earlier in 2000 about -- by one of the governor's associates about whether or not i would allow my name to be considered for vice president. i said no. i had a good job and i was happy living in dallas. i have health problems. that would be an issue. in in the oil business. that would be an issue. we are both residents of texas. that would be an issue. you cannot have the tax is a lack coral vote be cast for two guys from texas for president and vice president. if i had stayed in texas, we would not have been able to count the texas a look for votes towards my election for vice president and would have a bush/lieberman association. joe is not a bad guy, but you would not have wanted him for vice president. but, the second request was whether or not -- the governor called me and asked if i would help him find somebody. i told him i could do that. we could get it done in a couple of months and then i could go back to doing what i wanted to do which was to run the company. we ended up, right after the fourth of july, a couple of weeks before the convention, i went down to the ranch there outside of crawford before they have the new house built and they had a little bitty wooden frame house that they lived in. we spent the morning reviewing all of the candidates and then have lunch. he took me out on the back porch. it was about 120 in the shade that date. he said that i was a solution to this problem. i took that as a threat. i needed to work harder to find him somebody. he did not offer me the job, but he made it clear that he wanted to have me reconsider. he wanted my name on the list. i told him that what i would do is go run the traps and see what i had to do if i were to make myself available. we had a lot list of things-a long list of things we needed to do. i told him i wanted to go down to austin and sit down with him and whoever else he might like, karl rove or somebody else and discuss why he should not pick me. he said ok. the following saturday, i went down to austin and sat down with the president and karl and laid out the brief against me. i am from wyoming. if you do not carry wyoming, you are toast, anyway. there are only three electoral votes. we went through that whole exercise and he listened. karl agreed with me. [laughter] i went back to dallas and within a day or two, it was the governor saying that he wanted me to run. i often had the suspicion that he never really gave up after that first meeting earlier in the year and that he always had it in his mind he has never had knitted it to me. maybe he will after he sees this. [laughter] the thing that changed my mind was that i worked with him over a time frame of a few months where i heard and i could observe his mind working about what he wanted in a vice president and what he was looking for. this was a guy who was not going down the normal path of picking vice-president sberg you pick a guy like lyndon johnson and then you bury him someplace. they did not even let him go to meetings with the senate democrats when he was vice president. this-a vice-president and get them out of the way and have them attend funerals. he was off read about the electoral college votes. he was looking for somebody who could serve alongside him and be a participant in the process and get actively engaged. he liked my background, my experience and my resume. i can only convinced that he meant it when he said to sign on and i would be a major player in his administration and get involved in what ever i wanted to get involved in and be a participant in all the meetings. it sounded very attractive, frankly. he kept his word. we ran into gritted staffs and avoided a lot of the pitfalls that a lot of administrations have not aborted. -- not avoided,. i always got to voice my view and he always made the decision. it was, all things considered, for me, an absolutely fascinating experience. i love it. [applause] >> we have just a couple of minutes left, but i have a couple of questions left. we have a lot of young people in the audience and a number of them ask questions along the lines of what advice do you have for them who are very interested in politics and what to do something for this country, for those that want to pursue a career in public service. >> do it. [applause] i started out and i was born to be an academic. i thought i wanted to be a schoolteacher. not that there is anything about teaching, is honest were. but i got to washington on a fellowship in turn shipped and there are a lot of internships. they're brought many when i started out. there were only two in the wyoming state government and i got one of them for 40 days. but now, there are tremendous opportunities all the time for young people that want to start andand it's an experience participate. put your name on the ballot. start at any level. you do not have to be president of united states the first time out to have a major impact. you can do it in your local community or the state legislature. what ever moves you, what ever turn to one. it is a privilege that most of us come to appreciate the more we travel and get in the world and see what is going on out there. there is a lot of trouble that a lot of people had. you come to the united states of america, and it is whatever we make of it. you have the opportunity and the obligation to get out there and spend time and effort and resources serving. thereare a lot of ways to serve. it does nothave to be so much about successful political wars, a lot of this is at the center where students get some exposure of the legacy of ronald reagan and the ideas and principles. it is a tremendous privilege to be able to live in a society in a country like that and it will only be what it has been for all of us, to the extent that we get actively involved. we have an obligation. the young folks have to pick up that burden and see if they cannot do -- if they cannot do a better than we. >> and who is one to win the super bowl tomorrow? >> packers, packers. [applause] i am not sure there is anonymity -- there is unanimity on that. [laughter] >> no. [applause] >> you are going to take off. >> sunday on newsmakers, homeland's security secretary janet nepal tunnel on security threats and administration policy on border issues. that is a 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. >> the c-span networks provides coverage of politics, public affairs, nonfiction books of american history. it is all available on television, radio, online and on social media networking sites defined our content any time in our video library and we take our digital bus and local content vehicle on the road bring resources to your community. as washington, your way. it is now available in more than 100 million homes, created by cable, provided as a public service. now, a look at these state of judicial nominees. during this discussion, robert bauer expressed his concern over the number of judicial vacancies. you also hear remarks from caroline lamb and president clinton's deputy white house counsel william marshall. this is 1.5 hours. we are a network of lawyers, judges, and law students that promotes the vitality of our constitution and its fundamental values. individual rights and liberties, and genuine equality, access to justice acs has worked to draw attention to the judicial crisis. cement -- the senate only confirm 62 of barack obama's to additional nominees in the past two years, compared to 104 george bush, and 128 for bill clinton during the first two years of their presidency. we have 875 federal judgeships, and we now have 101 vacancies. that is an extraordinarily high number. 49 of those vacancies are described as judicial emergencies. most recently, the tragic death of judge john roll brought attention to this crisis. he was at the safeway in tucson to talk with gabby giffords about this very issue. about judicial vacancies in arizona. and his death has resulted in arizona now being added to the list of judicial emergencies. this vacancy crisis is obviously not a part -- a partisan issue. it is an issue about the integrity of our court and the administration of justice for the american people. on the heels of justice anthony kennedy calling attention to this problem, a group of nine circuit judges led by chief judge alex kosinski, a reagan appointee, wrote to senators reid and mcconnell, asking them to fill the vacancies. so what can be done about this? today we are extremely lucky to be able to hear from someone who is so well suited to answer that question. white house counsel paul bauer will share his view on the nomination process and what he sees as the likely development in the coming years. bob was named white house counsel in november 2009. it was formerly a partner of the law firm and chair of its political law group. he was president obama's personal attorney. he also served as general counsel to the dnc, as co- counsel to the -- and was general counsel to bill bradley for president. he was also counsel to the democratic leader in the trial of william jefferson clinton. bob has graciously agreed to take a few minutes of questions at the conclusion of his remarks and we will then hear from an extremely distinguished panel. now what is my pleasure to turn this over to bob bauer. thank you, bob. [applause] >> thank you for your invitation to speak on this. i have been free to make of this topic what i would. my hostess been kind enough to not suggest any particular approach to the topic. i would like to lay out what i hope we can accomplish this year in cooperation with the senate against the history of the last two years' history of experience with the senate. i will not rehearsed the familiar litany of complaints about the process. there is plentiful commentary on the subject. some of which is learned and useful, and some part of which is a myriad of accusations about who is behaving badly. one of my favorite, who behaved badly first, to lessen the culpability of the person who behaved badly second. here are the essential facts, and those of you who like to participate, you can look it up. the confirmation rate is terribly low. one result is the large number of seats dedicated as judicial emergencies, more than one half of the nominees now present in the senate our judicial emergencies. the state of emergency being that which by the standards of judicial conference is courts were the cases are filed exceeding the capacity to hear them. the vacancy rate overall has hovered around the historic 12%. this is twice the structural rate, twice the 5% rate that we might expect in the normal course of retirements and death. yet we have nominees that have waited for historic long periods of time for a vote. now total of 49 nominees before the senate, nominated in the last congress and now renominated for nominated for the first time just last week. the chief justice of the united states pointed out of minute ago correctly stated that the underlying problem has persisted for many years, and that the move to address it has become in his words "urgent." this is the second to take up the call against the breakdown in the nominations and confirmation process. chief justice rehnquist did the same some years before. for him, he stated that the consequence was a growing, unattended to do so work load and the threat it presented of an erosion in the quality of justice. over time, these have been registered by our range of forces and commissions like the miller commission in 1996, which opened its report by stating, "the federal judicial system continues to be plagued by troubling accretion of unfilled vacancies and delays in the appointment process and backlog of the pending appointment." the effectiveness of -- the state of judicial emergency is predictable and pernicious. a massive backlog of cases causing increases delays for americans seeking their day in court around the country. trials are delayed for months, some courts lacking the necessary capacity to outsource portions of their caseloads to other courts. an individual judge's on courts with numerous vacancies have had to take on hundreds and sometimes more than 1000 additional filings. what is the striking and disturbing about the state of affairs is what i will call the general absence in the political sphere of the same sense of urgency expressed by the chief justices. there are exceptions, to be sure. chairman leahy has spoken forcefully and eloquently to this problem, and his concerns are certainly actively shared by the democratic leadership. but i have noticed in recent months in the course of my conversations with members that this concern is spreading and it is by no means limited to one side of the aisle. republicans as well as democrats increasingly 8 knowledge, some privately, some publicly, that we're witnessing something profoundly troubling. it is true that many have pointed out that there are institutional and structural explanations for the woefully inadequate pace of confirmations. for example, the senate rules for all practical purposes permit a single senator to freeze the process for particular nominee. we're all familiar with the lament about the procedural tools that are available to accomplish delay or the means by which to lay becomes the functional equivalent of fatal opposition. these are all important points in the discussion of the purported the confirmation process. but there are significant largely as expressions of the problem, not as primary source. the problem is i see it is that more -- it is more subtle and more profound. it is the very climate now often felt in the confirmation process, many years in the making in which it is widely accepted that this is the way things go and that the cost cited by the chiefs, heavy costs, some are -- are somehow they're full. -- are somehow unbearable. proponents planning that large consequences will come from confirming or rejecting potential nominees. this type of conflict is far from the subdued setting for the confirmation struggles of today. it is a war, a term i do not care for, is a cold war and not a hot war. there are two examples of how whitmanic fest itself. first, nominees' left to languish on the floor for as much as hundreds of days without a but are basically ignored, not push to one side because of perceived deficiencies in their records or shortcomings as potential terrorists. it is a quite a blow to the process, but a heavy blow, nonetheless. no shopping on the floor, just nothing on the floor. it is sf, and it is apparently to some, as if it did not matter at all. but of course, it matters a great deal to the nominees, to the courts to which they were nominated to serve, and to the parties before those courts. chief justice rehnquist quite rightly pointed to the loss of quality of justice when we do not have enough judges for the cases to be decided. and it is all loss in the quality of justice when this very proposition, up proposition that we urgently need judges to have an effective and responsive judiciary, to an intermittent audits. that is one problem. let me cite another. in our selection of potential nominees, and in consultation with senators and in some cases representatives, we have been forced to give up on qualified candidates because opposition has been a concern about quality or qualifications. but in my experience, these concerns however strongly expressed are all too often hard to really pin down. sometimes it is a question of personal preference. the president has selected a candidate for nomination. and a particular member would have chosen differently. the stalls progress on filling the vacancy. if it stalls, well, it's false because it seems somehow that delayed does not matter as it should. this is a new world. a confirmation process once characterized by hard-fought battles waged on specific nominees is now disabled by steady resistance to moving nominees as a class of across the board. this can happen and it will only continue if the effects are seen somehow not to matter very much or not to matter enough. and yes, each party can only accuse the other of partisanship, of cutting back that successful number of nominations even when there is no way to focus on ideology. but if this is acceptable, even in the absence of major disagreements about confidence or etiology, it is ok to keep the short -- a " short of justices, then this only goes to show how the costs have become parable and how the loss in the quality of justice somehow has come to seem not to matter. one question raised from time to time is whether this administration can do more to elevate the issue. to call more attention to this grave problem from varying directions and in varying ways. be sure that we have made and we will continue to make this case as the president did forcefully in his letter to congress last october. there he highlighted what he called the dramatic shift in the confirmation process, which could produce a crisis in the judiciary. he wrote, "if there is a genuine concern about the qualifications of about judicial nominees, this is a debate i welcome. but that consistent refusal to move promptly, to have that debate or to confirm those nominees with broad bipartisan support, does a disservice to the senate and the american people it serves." in this new congress, we will continue to make this case for treating the confirmation of judges as the urgent priority it is, we will make this case through the end of the session and into the next. our goal is to do so in a way that defines the issue and seeks to raise the sense of urgency and calls on the good faith and shared commit