Trump Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, yesterday marked 6 months since President Trump took office, and today is the 200th day of the Republican majority here in the U.S. Senate.

In that time, the Trump administration and Senate Republicans have been hard at work executing the mandate we received from the American people last November. We already have a number of accomplishments on the list.

We got started by sending the Laken Riley Act to President Trump's desk during his first week in office to keep criminal illegal immigrants off our streets.

President Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act last Wednesday, which permanently classifies fentanyl analogs as the deadly drugs they are.

On Friday, he signed the GENIUS Act, the landmark bill to bring digital assets into the mainstream and secure U.S. leadership in financial innovation.

And the first rescissions package in three decades is headed to the President for signature.

We have passed measures to end 16 burdensome Biden-era regulations. We passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act to combat nonconsensual explicit images being shared online.

And, of course, 2 weeks ago on the Fourth of July, the President signed into law the Big Beautiful Bill to deliver permanent tax relief to the American people to make our country safer, stronger, and more prosperous.

We have additional bills coming down the pike. The Armed Services Committee under Chairman Wicker recently reported the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal year 2026, and the Appropriations Committee under Chair Collins has reported out four bipartisan bills, which we will begin considering this week.

I said last year that I was committed to bringing appropriations bills to the floor through regular order, and we are in the process of doing exactly that.

Of course, any regular order consideration of appropriations bills is going to require cooperation from Democrats. This week, we will get a glimpse of where Democrats are on this issue.

It was deeply disappointing the Democrat leader threatened to shut down the government if Republicans dared to pass legislation to trim just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Federal budget, but I am hopeful that is not the position of the Democratic Party.

Time will tell.

The Senate also has important work to do to confirm the President's nominees. We started out this year by confirming 21 of the President's Cabinet nominees at the fastest pace in more than two decades, and we have kept up our focus on getting President Trump's team into place.

We have now confirmed 96 civilian nominees, far outpacing where the Senate was at this point in the first Trump administration. And the only reason, frankly, that we are not moving faster is because of Democrats' historic--that is right historic--level of obstruction.

Democrats have been forcing cloture votes for every civilian nominee. Something that is without precedent. President Trump is the first President on record not to have a single civilian nominee go by unanimous consent or voice vote at this point in his Presidency. The first President on record. Think about that.

And Democrats are using this strategy even on noncontroversial nominees. Almost a quarter of the nominees whose confirmation process Democrats have dragged out actually got more than 60 votes here on the Senate floor.

The American people gave President Trump a mandate, and he deserves to have his team in place to execute that mandate for the American people. Democrats can continue to drag this process out, but Republicans are going to get these nominees confirmed.

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