Grassley Statement on Raymond Chen Nomination:
Prepared Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley
Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee
On the Nomination of
Raymond T. Chen to be United States Circuit Judge for the Federal Circuit
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Mr. President,
I support the nomination of Raymond T. Chen, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Federal Circuit. This is the 29th judicial confirmation this year. With today’s confirmation, the Senate will have confirmed 200 lower court nominees; we have defeated two. That’s 200-2. That is an outstanding record. That’s a success rate of 99 percent. I think we’ve had a pretty outstanding record this Congress.
And we have been doing that at a fast pace. During the last Congress we confirmed more judges than any Congress since the 103rd Congress, which was 1993-94.
So far this year, the first of President Obama’s second term, we’ve already confirmed more judges than were confirmed in the entire first year of President Bush’s second term.
At a similar stage in President Bush’s second term, only 10 judicial nominees had been confirmed. So we are now at a 29 to 10 comparison, with President Obama clearly ahead of where President Bush was at a similar time frame.
And, as I said, we’ve already confirmed more nominees this year – 29 – than we did during the entirety of 2005, the first year of President Bush’s second term, when 21 lower court judges were confirmed.
With regard to hearings, the record shows that President Obama is being well received here in the Senate, much better than President Bush during the first year of his second term.
Last week we held the eleventh judicial nominations hearing this year. In those hearings we have considered a total of 33 judicial nominees.
Compare this favorable treatment of President Obama during the beginning of his second term versus the first year of President Bush’s second term. At this stage in President Bush’s second term, the Committee had held not 11 hearings with 33 judicial nominees, but only 3 hearings for 5 nominees. And all of those were hold-overs from the previous Congress.
For the entire year of 2005, Senate Democrats only allowed 7 hearings for a grand total of 18 judicial nominees.
It is hard to believe, but in 2005 no nominations hearings on judicial nominees were held during April, May, June or July. Four months with no judicial nominations hearing. Yet we recently rushed through hearings on nominees to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, plus a number of district nominations.
In fact, in just the last few weeks we have held hearings for fourteen judicial nominees. That’s not very far behind the entire output of 2005 – seven hearings, 18 nominees.
Again, we have already exceeded that number – 11 hearings and 33 judicial nominees. The bottom line is that the Senate is processing the President’s nominees exceptionally fairly.
President Obama certainly is being treated more fairly in the first year of his second term than Senate Democrats treated President Bush in 2005. It is not clear to me how allowing more votes and more hearings than President Bush got in an entire year amounts to “unprecedented delays and obstruction.” Yet, that is the complaint we hear over and over from the other side.
So I just wanted to set the record straight—again—before we vote on this nomination.
Raymond T. Chen is nominated to be United States Circuit Judge for the Federal Circuit. He received his B.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and his J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1994. Upon graduation, Mr. Chen worked at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear in California from 1994 to 1996. As an associate, he drafted district court briefs and legal memoranda on specific patent and trademark issues as well as several patent applications spanning various technologies.
In 1996, Mr. Chen joined the Senior Technical Assistant’s Office at the Federal Circuit in Washington as one of three technical assistants. There, he researched and wrote memoranda, commenting on drafts of court opinions for both legal and technical accuracy as well as identification of conflicting legal precedent, occasionally writing for individual judges.
From 1998 to 2008, Mr. Chen served as an Associate Solicitor in the Office of the Solicitor at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. During that time, he was first or second chair on several dozen Federal Circuit briefs defending the agency’s patent and trademark decisions, and he presented approximately 20 arguments in the Federal Circuit.
He regularly appeared in district court defending the agency against lawsuits brought under the Administrative Procedure Act. He was also a legal advisor on several patent policy and legal issues within the agency, occasionally prosecuting patent attorneys in administrative proceedings for violating the agency’s code of professional responsibility.
In 2008, Mr. Chen became the Deputy General Counsel of Intellectual Property Law and Solicitor. There he supervises other lawyers in the Solicitor’s Office and has presented oral arguments in some of the seminal patent cases before the Federal Circuit. In addition, Mr. Chen deals with higher level patent and trademark policy issues within the agency. He also coordinates the determination of what positions the United States should take as an amicus in intellectual property cases before both the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit. Lastly, Mr. Chen is responsible for the review and clearance of all new regulations and amendments to existing regulations for the Office of the Solicitor.
The ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary gave him a unanimous “Well Qualified” rating.
