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Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I would like to start by thanking Senator Warnock for letting me jump ahead in the speaking order today. I appreciate it. I am only going to take a couple of minutes.

Yesterday, in the press report, apparently, I had reported what I said at lunch for the news about me talking about a simple concept. I don't know. I think the American people are on board with me. We have to show up for work, right? I think we have to.

The reason we had 18 votes on Monday night is because some of my colleagues on my side of the aisle--folks, this is not a partisan--it is partisan. It ended up focusing on some of my colleagues. You have to show up for work. We have got work to do here. And I understand there are all kinds of good reasons. But there is no excuse to let Chuck Schumer force these judicial nominations down our throat.

We have got to show up for work. What happened on Monday night only occurred because Republicans were not here. They are my colleagues. They are my friends. But they are business associates first who have a job of making sure that we prevent Chuck Schumer from driving a lot of these judicial nominations that, if we are here, won't be successful.

The only reason we were here until midnight on Monday night is because some of my colleagues didn't show up. I am just saying, folks, this is pretty simple. I have spent most of my career in business. If my senior staff didn't show up or my former partners at Pricewaterhouse didn't show up, we would find them another job.

We get this job, whether we want it or not, unless we resign. You can't fire us in the midterm or in the middle of our terms. But I can express my concern with giving Chuck Schumer an easy way to beat Republicans who want to vote against and potentially defeat some of these very liberal judges.

So all I am saying--so that the press gets it right--people put words in my mouth at a private lunch. That is OK. People do that around here. I don't. But let me say what I said at lunch: 90 percent of success is showing up. If we were here on Monday night, we wouldn't have been here until midnight because we would have defeated Chuck Schumer's opportunity to do it then.

If we are not here every single day--I had somebody ask me: Well, when do I need to be there for that Fourth Circuit nominee? When is that vote going to occur?

I said: When you are not here.

We have got to show up, folks. The American people expect us to show up for a job. These are my friends. These are my colleagues. These are people I work together with. But they let me down on Monday. They better not let me down for the rest of the session or every time we fail because we failed to show up. I will be back down here to remind my colleagues that the American people and the people who elected us in our great States want us to do our jobs. You can't do your job if you are not here.

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