The Senate is supposed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, and instead it’s where so much legislation goes to die. Do you feel that it’s broken? What I see in the Senate is how important one person is. That person on the Republican side is Mitch McConnell. There are very pragmatic reasons that he holds his caucus together: He is the money person. The Republican senators having tough races, they go to him, and he provides resources. If Mitch McConnell said, “OK, we’re going to work with the Democrats,” it would happen — even if there would be holdouts like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Tommy Tuberville and that handful of people who — I don’t know who they think they’re representing except themselves. Mitch McConnell is a guy who single-handedly made the Supreme Court an eight-person court. Whoever heard of such a thing? And he got away with it. When one person has outsize influence like Mitch McConnell, we need to figure out ways to deal with it, and one way is filibuster reform. It could be totally removing the filibuster. I don’t think a lot of my colleagues are there.
What does it mean to say both that Democrats believe in process and also that process can’t overtake what the party is trying to achieve? I never thought that the ends should justify the means. You know fairness when you see it. Like you know art when you see it. We still need to be fair, and therefore the talking filibuster, if we go there, would apply to everybody; there might come a time when the Democrats are in the minority, and that would apply to us. Limitations or changes in the process should apply to everyone. That strikes me as fair. (...)
In your eyes, did the way that the Justice Kavanaugh and Barrett confirmations were rammed through hurt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court has become ideologically far to the right. So you’re going to see 6-3 decisions along ideological lines, and that is not good for our country. It’s not good for all the circuit courts and district courts. It’s going to lead to a lot more cases being brought to the Supreme Court by right-wing groups. Janus was a case in point.
Wouldn’t the left be doing the same things if Democrats had appointed the last three Supreme Court justices? I get that kind of argument often. I expect the Supreme Court to actually expand people’s individual rights and freedoms. I don’t expect the Supreme Court to be constraining voting rights and a woman’s right to choose. I expect the Supreme Court to be protective of minority rights, and that is not where this Court is. So this is not an equivalency. I don’t mind conservatives on the Court. I mean, of the three new ones Gorsuch is pretty conservative, but he’s a literal person: If it says so right there in black and white, then he’ll go with it. Sometimes it results in really stupid decisions, in my view. If the law was there to protect people from falling through a round hole and a person fell through a square hole — too bad for you. He’s smart enough to know that’s a ridiculous posture.
When you questioned Barrett at her appeals-court nomination hearing, it seemed as if you were trying to figure out how her Catholicism might influence her rulings. That avenue of questioning made some people uncomfortable. Where’s the line with religious questions for judicial nominees? It wasn’t her Catholicism. It was her position. She was a co-author of an expansive law-review article talking about how judges should decide death-penalty cases. It was an area of inquiry, but her Catholicism — frankly, I’m a Buddhist. I’m not even a daily-practicing Buddhist because I find all religion to be very — Buddhism accepts other religions more so than many other religions I can think of. So it wasn’t that she was a Catholic, but that there’s supposed to be this thing called separation of church and state, which is becoming blurred. Her religion, I didn’t care. What I care about is the use of religion as basically trumping every other right. I was presiding over the Senate, and Senator Tuberville says something like we should bring morality back and God and prayer should come back into our schools. I’m sitting there going, What? But that is the view of too many Republicans.
You cut yourself off earlier. You find all religion to be very what? I find a lot of religion to have all of the proscriptions and not openness and acceptance of other people’s legitimately held faiths. That is why I describe myself as a Buddhist. Buddhism, we don’t even have a book. It is a way of living and being, which is to be compassionate and kind. I think those are two good things to try to follow. I’m not perfect in that. I can be very terse with people. Part of it is that I don’t think many of my colleagues have dealt with short Japanese women. So here I come, and I’m saying, “[expletive] you” to them, and they don’t quite know how to react.
Can you think of an example? Ted Cruz. I was his ranking on his Constitution subcommittee and we had a number of these hearings; not very many of my Democratic colleagues would come. A reporter asked me why and I said they have better things to do than to come to these half-assed hearings. There was one in which all these Republicans who showed up went over their five minutes, and it got me kind of irritated. I said to Cruz, “Are you going to let everybody go eight minutes, nine minutes?” And he said, “When you get the gavel, you can do whatever you want.” I put my hand on his shoulder — this was pre-Covid — and I said, “It can’t happen soon enough.” At that same hearing — we had a break so the mics were not on; it’s not like I’m saying this in an open hearing — he said, “Look, it’s not my fault that your people are not here.” I said, “I don’t give a flying [expletive] what your reasoning is.” He stopped and said, “I will always treat you with decorum, even if it’s not reciprocated.” I said, “I wasn’t swearing at you.” (...)
I’m curious about interpersonal relationships in the Senate after Jan. 6 and also in the light of continued threats of violence at the Capitol. Have things changed — on a human level — with you and your Republican colleagues since then? It is hard to talk with them in any other way than purely transactional. What am I going to say? “How could you not condemn the incitement to insurrection?” I often wonder how they wake up in the morning and face themselves, but they are obviously able to bifurcate. They act as if nothing happened. That’s the amazing thing. You have Cruz, Hawley and all these guys who continued to protest the counting of the electoral votes even after what we experienced. I don’t know how they live with themselves. Then you have people like Lindsey Graham: When you enter the moral dead zone that is the Trump ambit, you’ve lost your soul. So I am pretty much just transactional with them. Some of them can be nice. But then when they vote en masse to screw people over, it’s hard to be all warm and fuzzy — and I’m not a warm and fuzzy person to begin with.
