Rushmore State News

U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) addressed the Senate on Thursday, urging Democratic senators to allow a vote on a proposal aimed at reforming the Senate’s process for confirming presidential nominees. Thune criticized what he described as prolonged delays by Democrats, noting that the current proposal had been under discussion for two years and was originally introduced by Democrats.

Thune stated, “I would just say to my colleagues on the Democrat side: How much time is enough? How much time is enough? The proposal that we are voting on – or want to vote on and just asked consent to get on – has been around for two years! Introduced by Democrats. They had a hearing in the Rules Committee. It’s been around for two years! In fact, what we’re supposed to vote on today is less expansive than the bill that was discussed in the Rules Committee. The Democrat Rules Committee. A proposal made by Democrats. We don’t include judges in this; your proposal did. We’re asking you to vote on a Democrat proposal and you’re saying, ‘No, we won’t even vote on it; we won’t even get on it!’ Give me a break.”

He referenced statistics comparing approval rates of presidential nominees across several administrations, emphasizing a downward trend under President Biden. Thune remarked, “Every president going back to ‘41,’ George H. W. Bush, has had a majority – a supermajority – of their nominees approved here in the Senate by unanimous consent or voice vote. Look at that! Ninety-eight percent. Ninety-eight percent for Bill Clinton. Ninety percent for George W. Bush, 90 percent for Obama. Sixty-five percent for Trump I. Fifty-seven percent for Biden. Not trending in the right direction – which argues for everything that’s being said here today about, we need to fix a broken process.”

Thune also highlighted procedural issues contributing to delays and called attention to the volume of votes required to address pending nominations: “President Biden had 530 of his nominees confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent... To finish just the nominees in the pipeline today, between now and the end of the year, we would have to cast another 600 votes... That’s what this means – another 600 votes.”

He urged bipartisan cooperation and swift action: “Time to quit stalling. Time to vote. Time to fix this place, and the ideal way to fix it would be in a bipartisan way... We looked at them all... We had some very good people who spent the month of August examining how to fix this process in a way that would get us to an outcome that preserved the institutional prerogatives of the Senate, that preserves advice and consent under the Constitution, but gets away from that embarrassing statistic... This is a broken process, folks.”

Thune concluded his remarks with an appeal for progress: “We’re going to start to fix it today, I hope... A solution, a solution that is bipartisan, initiated by Democrats two years ago, which has been talked about ad infinitum, ad nauseam, just this week alone – not to mention the six weeks going back to the end of the July work period.”