It’s always a privilege to come to UVa. and to see the Law School’s vibrant commitment to public service and public interest law. And working together, the faculty, the administration, the students, the alumni of UVa. Law have made yet a twenty-first century model of how a law school can expand the vision of its students and prepare them effectively for a lifelong commitment to public service. Your pro-bono program introduces students to the challenges and the very real rewards of using law to help those in need. And your loan assistance programs enable students to avoid the burdensome debt and afford to begin their legal careers in public interest jobs. And your many clinics and courses provide a hands-on introduction to public interest law including the newest advocacy programs on the elderly, on international human rights, and on immigration. And your public interest law fellowships offer exciting opportunities for experience in service to others through the law. One of the best lessons these programs teach is that there are countless ways to be a public interest lawyer. The example set by another famous son of Virginia, Louis Powell showed the difference that early experience in the field can make. As a young lawyer before World War II, he served in the Richmond Legal Aid Society. In 1964, as a leading private practitioner, he became president of the American Bar Association. And one of his first acts was to call for a major expansion of the nation’s legal services to the poor.

To understand how revolutionary that idea was, you have to know that when my brother became President in 1961, there was no national legal service program. There long have been legal aid in public defender offices in many cities and a few privately funded groups made poverty law a part of community development organizations, but hardly any taxpayer dollars supported them. In those days, poverty law programs were too controversial for the government to support openly. Instead, Robert Kennedy as Attorney General formed the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and made himself the Chairman. Under the banner of fighting urban youth crime, the committee allocated funds in various federal departments to pay for legal service offices in poor communities. In 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society, Congress enacted a genuine Anti-Poverty Program in the Office of Economic Opportunity and under Sergeant Schreiber became a source for legal services’ funding throughout the country. That program filled such an obvious need that five years later when the incoming Nixon administration tried to abolish it, the Bar and many of us on Capitol Hill were able not only to save the program, but to create the Legal Service Corporation as an ongoing federally funded program. Ironically, President Nixon himself signed that into law as his last legislative act before resigning as President. The attacks on the program didn’t stop however and its scope continued to be targets. Nevertheless, with the support of the organized Bar, it has persisted and even flourished in this state and throughout the country and a majority of us in Congress continue to support it.

There is one other irony to the story. In 1971, when in a battle President Nixon sought a non-controversial nominee to replace Justice Hugo Black on the Supreme Court, he chose that same Louis Powell and the nomination sailed through the Senate, in large part because Powell had proven his dedication to Constitutional principles of equality and fairness by his lifelong devotion to the legal services movement.

My own experience as a public interest lawyer was quite different from Justice Powell’s. I began as a political campaigner. Undoubtedly, some of you will also begin your public service in an election campaign this year or in 2008. And perhaps you will be as fortunate as I was in 1960 and the campaign you join will be a successful campaign for President. I hope some of you will join a District Attorney’s office as I also did as a young lawyer. Or perhaps you will be a public defender or a legal service lawyer dealing directly with clients. They are all inspiring ways to become involved in public interest law and effective ways to learn the practical art of good lawyering as well. I sincerely hope some of you will try for elected office yourselves. If you have the chance, I highly recommend the U.S. Senate. UVa. gives you a head start. There were two UVa. law graduates in the Senate when I was elected in 1962. Hugh Scott from the class of ’22 and John Stennis from the class of ’20, both powering figures in the Senate. And ten more graduates of this school arrived after that, after I did. And there are hundreds more UVa’ers in public office at every level of government. There are thirteen graduates of this law school that have served in the United States Senate while I served in the United States Senate. More than any other law school in the country.

As Senate is we represent our constituents and answers to them on election day, but in a very real sense, we also answer directly to the Founders who imagined Philadelphia during that hot summer of 1787 and created the kind of government that enables us, despite our many faults, to become the greatest nation in history. The Founders were brilliant men who established a constitutional structure that has worked well through two hundred years of time and change, war and peace, pain and progress. But that structure always has and always will rely on citizens with the courage and commitment to fulfill its promise. They counted on each generation to elect members of Congress who would prevent the Executive from abusing its powers. In addition as George Washington said, the Senate was to be a saucer that could cool the sometimes overheated legislation that might be produced by the House of Representatives. They counted as well on the advice and consent of the Senate to make sure that presidential choices for the Cabinet and judicial posts would serve the public interest and not just the President’s personal or partisan interests. Rather than the two-year terms of the House and the four-year terms of the President, Senators were given the stability of six-year terms and the terms were staggered so that only a third of the Senate would be chosen at any one election as a way to resist what James Madison called “the impulse of sudden and violent passions”. The Framers also felt the Senate would have the knowledge and skills to make sure the President pursued the national interests in dealing with foreign nations and thus, treaties vital to a young maritime nation, could not be implemented by the President without our advice and consent. Finally, the Framers entrusted the Senate with the ultimate responsibility of serving as the jury to decide whether an impeached President or judge should be removed from office.

It’s no wonder that many of us in the Senate always have copies of the Constitution readily at hand. And it’s no surprise that we keep going back to the Federalist papers to get new insights into what the Framers expected of us. For us, the Constitution is not just a historic document, under glass at the National Archives Building in Washington. The status and responsibility that the Founders gave us are meant to be applied every hour of everyday. We do not have the right to ignore or dilute or wave them because they are not ours to dispose of. They belong permanently to the people we temporarily serve. They are the nation’s legacy and we are the current trustees of that legacy. Our obligation is to see that the legacy is preserved and respected, used in the public interest, and handed intact for the benefit of our successes in all future generations.

From the very beginning of my service in the Senate, the powerful force of Constitutional principles has been at the heart of my own public service. In my very first year, resistance to the Supreme Court school desegregation cases culminated in President Kennedy’s decision to federalize the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama. Two months later, the historic Civil Rights March on Washington took place and Martin Luther King’s "I Have A Dream" speech focused the nation on the fact that litigation alone could not meet the need for progress and basic rights and that we in that Congress would have to act. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy sent us legislation protecting those rights, not only in public schools, but also in public accommodations, in employment and voting. Thus began many intense years of debating and testing the Constitutional limits of our power to vindicate the basic rights of Americans of all races. Until then, the Senate’s record on civil rights had not been a proud one. The same powers and traditions, the same expectation of a carefully deliberation and evolutionary change that enabled the Senate to be a restraint on reckless government also allowed opponents of Civil Rights to restrain the pace of needed change. The Framers had given the Senate the power to make its own rules. And those rules favoring lengthy debate, consensus, and caution in the spirit of the Constitution also allowed a minority of Southerners to prevent delay much needed change by filibustering basic reforms. The Senate became the critical battleground in the fight for full civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.

President Kennedy did not live to see the results of his initiative, but I was privileged to be part of the debate as the Republican leader Eric Dirks of Illinois and our Southern President Lyndon Johnson decided that the time had come for long overdue applications of the noble principles of our Constitution to all of our people. Seventy-one Senators, including twenty-six Republicans voted to end the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And a year to the day after President Kennedy submitted his proposed legislation, the Senate passed it. And the path towards full, Constitutional citizenship suddenly opened wide for millions of Americans. The strong support of the Senate ensured that this national force would be accepted by the American people as the law of the land. But that historic vindication of the Constitution was not the only one in my first years as a Senator. One of my first speeches in the Senate was in support of Senate ratification of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaties negotiated by my brother with the Russians. As the Framers foresaw, the nation’s strong support for what he called “this fresh start on the road to peace” was dramatized and amplified by the vote of eighty-one Senators for ratification of the treaty. It has been the same process again and again since then. A Senate designed to be deliberative has proven it can be decisive when needed. And new generations of Senators have found new ways to meet the challenges of their time within a structure that is hundreds of years old.

I think of the battles earlier in my Senate career to abolish the poll taxes, to preserve the Supreme Court’s Constitutional one-person, one-vote, decisions on Congressional districting. To lower the voting age to eighteen. To abolish the shameful racism of our longstanding restrictions on immigrants in the so-called Asian Pacific Triangle. I also think of the passionate debate over nominations to the Supreme Court by President Nixon and President Reagan and their rejection by the Senate. There was the intense confrontation with President Nixon over Watergate and his gross abuse of presidential power that lead to his resignation on the eve of the debate in the House of Representatives on his impeachment. Followed a quarter-century later by the Senate’s rejection of the partisan effort by the House of Representatives to remove President Clinton through impeachment.

But I can remember, no time, no time in my life when it has been as important as it is today for the Senate to serve a check on the executive branch. The administration has seized upon the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath to assert powers that no President has ever had and take actions that the Senate must not leave unchallenged. President Bush opposed Congressional efforts to investigate the government failures that contributed to the 9/11 tragedy. The administration gave Congress faulty intelligence and incomplete and misleading information when Congress voted to authorize the War in Iraq. The President continues to claim unlimited power to hold detainees indefinitely and created military tribunals rather than deferring to the courts. He approves policies authorizing torture and inhumane treatment of detainees and violation of federal law, military rules, and traditions and he refused to come clean to Congress when the facts in the documents began to show the actual abuses occurring.

Today we are embroiled in the debate over the President’s claimed power as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to authorize massive, warrantless, electronic surveillance of American citizens here at home without complying with the statutory requirement of judicial approval. Together these and other actions demonstrate the administration’s clear rejection of the Constitution’s demand for a balance of powers among the branches of government. They suggest an arrogance in the White House that betrays the rule of law that is central to our Constitutional structure. The Framers anticipated that there might be such abuses and they expected the Senate to remedy them. As matters arose, the Senate must be in all cases, a salutary check on the government and in the past five years, some of us in the Senate have tried to exercise this Constitutional responsibility sometimes with partial success and sometimes in vain. The White House largely succeeded in preventing serious inquiry into 9/11 by the Joint Senate and House Intelligence Committee. It refused to turn over relevant documents and provide key witnesses and the inquiry finally reached its preset deadline, but the Congressional and public demand, especially from the Senate, for a thorough investigation continued and we were able to obtain bipartisan support for a law creating an independent investigating commission. And the 9/11 Commission held comprehensive public hearings and it detailed a thorough report offering at least a partial accounting of the many errors and omissions contributing to 9/11. That accounting will help us prevent future attacks if we have the will and the wisdom to implement it.

We have made much less progress in the complex disputes over the scope of the President’s power as Commander and Chief. The White House has taken the extreme position that as long as terrorism is involved, the President’s inherent powers prompt specific statutes and treaties that are law of the land. This has postured the President as a virtually perpetual war President since the administration has also said that the War on Terror may last for generations. In my judgment, it is a stunning arrogance of power that would have made the Founder of this great university, Thomas Jefferson, roll over in his grave. Senators on both sides of the aisle have complained about the White House’s assumption that it can detain suspects indefinitely without any judicial review, conduct interrogations using techniques that are classified as torture by U.S. law and international treaties and turn U.S. detainees over to other nations for torture. In each of these cases, we have asked for the relevant documents, we have urged comprehensive hearings and called for independent investigations like the 9/11 Commission, but we have been effectively rebuttaled by Senate Republican majority that appears more concerned about protecting the President, of their party, than fulfilling the Constitutional mandates to be a check against such abuses. I sit on two of the committees that should be involved in this effort, the Armed Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee. Even when the Republican Chairman had been willing to hold hearings on some of these issues, the administration’s witnesses have been uncooperative. Again and again, we’ve been stonewalled, slow-walked, mislead on the real stories of these practices and denied meaningful access to the responsible officials and documents that could tell us what actually happened.

On torture, the original disclosures made clear that top military legal offices in the Pentagon strongly resisted the civilian decisions to prevent torture, but the civilians prevailed. We knew that the internal debate in the administration had escalated to the highest levels of the Justice Department, the State Department, and the White House. Nevertheless, the administration provided us with witness after witness who portrayed the abuses as aberrations by a few bad apples at the lowest level in the field. A few glide by everything that we have come to know. Military investigations and prosecutions likewise both focus on those at the bottom of the chain of abuses involving detention and interrogation. Meanwhile, those at the policy-making end of the chain have escaped responsibility for authorizing and justifying violations of long-standing military rules and statutes that prohibit torture. Many of those officials rather than being investigated or disciplined, have been promoted and honored. At least two were nominated to Federal Appeals Courts and one was confirmed by the Senate before his role was disclosed. Another major player became Attorney General of the United States. He took the precaution just before his conformation hearing of withdrawing the key memo at the heart of the torture statute, but he did so only after it had been enforced for over two years. After his confirmation hearing, despite his refusal to provide relevant documents and responsive answers, he was approved on a party-line vote in the United States Senate. Thankfully, the Senate has not been altogether silent. As John McCain’s initiative, we adopted an amendment making clear that torture is prohibited in the interrogation of detainees. After initially opposing the amendment, President Bush praised it and signed it, but when he did so, he hypocritically reserved the right to ignore it in his signing statement, claiming it might interfere with his powers as Commander–in-Chief.

The same pattern of abuse can be seen on warrantless surveillance. The administration has chosen to tell us very little about their spying program, but the few facts that they have shared with Congress makes clear that the administration is flouting a specific law prohibiting such ease-dropping without court review. When we asked for the legal basis for the administration’s program, we got answers but they were rationalizations that would get a failing grade at any class at UVa. Law School. The pattern has been the same on detention practices and the so-called practice of rendition, the transfer of prisoners to other nations known to practice torture. There has been no meaningful oversight either by Congress itself or through the establishment of an independent 9/11 Commission. The necessary documents are in the files of the Executive Branch, but Congress has refused to issues subpoenas demanding them. These issues of torture, detention, surveillance, have rightly claimed major headlines the past few years, but beneath the issues of the day is the issue of a lifetime: whether Congress will find the power and conviction to perform its Constitutional role.

The Framers counted on each generation to reinforce our Constitutional structure. When we fail to hold the Executive to account, that structure is weakened. Perhaps, permanently. This is a challenge that should concern every American. If the President does not give due respect to the Constitutional role of the Congress and the Congress will not stand up against him when he violates that principle, how can the Constitution be preserved?

On such critical questions, it is also useful to consult the wisdom of the father of this University, Thomas Jefferson. A few years before he died, Jefferson reflected upon the democracy he helped create and wrote, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves. And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true of correction of abuses of Constitutional power.” Those words rightly placed the ultimate responsibility to protect and preserve our Constitutional system on all of us here today. As the lawyers and leaders and Senators of the future, you have a special obligation to educate the public on these issues by teaching and writing and speaking about them and working with groups that care about these issues.

So you have your assignment. Carry it out and you will join in the great tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Louis Powell, and you will make it possible for future generations here and across the country to confront modern challenges with the help of an unyielding Constitutional framework that has never ceased to and must always protect us all.