THIRD ANNUAL TEXAS CHAPTERS CONFERENCE KEYNOTE ADDRESS

With a Republican in the White House and so many judicial vacancies in Texas, we can imagine how hard Senator Cruz, our Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee, and I have been working to help the White House select and vet the best and brightest judicial nominees for the federal courts and to get them confirmed.[...]frankly, I am not too interested in judges who have already decided what the outcome of contested cases will be before they hear the case.Frustrated and disdainful of a Republican Congress, and impatient with the consensus-building required of legislation, President Obama repeatedly took matters into his own hands.25 In 2009, the Department of Justice quit enforcing certain federal drug laws.26 In 2011, the Department ofJustice refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act,27 a law passed by Congress overwhelmingly28 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.29 And in 2012, the Obama Administration announced it would not enforce provisions of federal immigration law against a class of roughly one million individuals illegally present in the United States.30 Now, we do not have the time and you do not have the patience to talk about all of these, but let me talk about the last one, which has come to be known as DACA-Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.See Amanda Hollis-Bruskey, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counter-Revolution 154 (describing the Federalist Society as the informal gatekeeper for vetting judicial nominees to the lower federal courts and to the Supreme Court during Republican administrations).