franken

U.S. Sen. Al Franken, calling himself “a voice for the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren’t lawyers” on the Senate floor Wednesday night, continued his harsh critique of the U.S. Supreme Court, lambasting its recent record of overturning its own precedents:

Again, I think that this is judicial activism. In fact, I think it’s judicial activism in one direction — away from long-standing protections for the individual and towards a more friendly law for the powerful.

Franken endorsed high-court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, praising her “inherent judicial restraint” and promising that “a vote for Judge Sotomayor is a vote against judicial activism.”

Franken, one of a half-dozen non-lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, used legalese like stare decisis to attack a series of high-court rulings from the last five years on such issues as workers’ rights, voting rights, price-fixing, campaign finance and securities regulation.

But he described those decisions — some well-known, some not — in terms of how they affect the daily lives of Americans, particularly Minnesotans.

Indeed, the Senate’s freshest freshman seemed to have tailored his talk to Minnesotan citizens, mentioning his home state 16 times in the course of his 16-minute speech (pdf). He used the state’s gender-gap (women earn 74 cents to every men’s dollar) and cited Minnesota’s own homegrown Ponzi schemer (Tom Petters) alongside the nationally known Bernie Madoff. Also getting shout-outs were Minnesota’s older workers, working women, investors and small-business owners.

Franken’s speech was an extended followup — measured but not tempered — to his fiery five-minute remarks during the Judiciary Committee hearings last week. Here’s the video, via C-SPAN: