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Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, when my girls were little--and they are not little anymore; they are adults now. When they were little, I can remember, at times, I would be working from the house, in our little office space in the house, and one of the girls would crawl up in my lap.
She would look at me while I would be working on the computer, and she would say the same thing every time:
What'cha doin'?
Every time.
What'cha doin'?
I think about that when I think about the last 7 months here in the Senate. I have folks at home who will look at the U.S. Senate and say: What have you been doing for a while? ``What'cha doin'?''
What has been good is to have been able to answer the question a lot. This has been the most productive beginning point for a new President in the first 7 months of the Senate in decades. Let me just walk through just a little bit of what we have been doing. We began this year by passing the Laken Riley Act, which requires ICE to start arresting illegal migrants who have committed crimes. Amazingly enough, that wasn't a requirement before. We fixed that.
We passed and made law the TAKE IT DOWN Act. This is about the revenge porn that we are seeing that has affected so many young lives. They are posting their images and sometimes using AI to destroy the lives of people they either hate, used to date, or whatever it may be. We now passed that and made that Federal law to be able to protect the youngest generation from that kind of vulnerability.
We passed the HALT Fentanyl Act, permanently classifying fentanyl- related substances as schedule I drugs. Amazingly, we had to do that year after year. It was always a challenge. We started dealing with fentanyl in the serious manner that it needed to be dealt with. We passed that and made that law.
We passed the GENIUS Act, which puts the United States on the forefront of digital currency. This is not cryptocurrency. This is dealing with stablecoins, which is similar to a traveler's check only in digital form, to say, dollar for dollar, this creates new competition for credit cards and online shopping. It creates a way to do this to be able to put the United States and American currency in the lead in the digital world while still protecting physical currency and guaranteeing that physical American currency continues to exist.
Just those alone would be significant to get out when beginning a session, but we are not close to being done. The Senate has held more than 440 votes just this year so far. That is more than most years of the Senate, in total, in the last 30 years that we have done just in the first 6 months. That is more votes in the beginning of any session since the Reagan administration. We began with 10 straight weeks--day after day after day--of just pounding away to get stuff done.
We have worked on nominations, and this body is still working on confirmations even right now. We have confirmed, so far, 119 of President Trump's nominees. To compare that to this same spot 8 years ago in the first term of the first Trump Presidency, they had 56 who were done at this point. We have now done 119. We have done twice as many confirmations now as what we did under the first Trump administration, but we still have quite a few to go. This has been, though, doing this the easy way or the hard way for the past 7 months.
You see, confirmations typically are done by voice vote here in the U.S. Senate because we have work to do on legislative work as well. Unlike the House, we do personnel, and we do policy. We have to switch back and forth between the two often, but every time we are working on the personnel side--the confirmation side--every single nomination takes about 3 hours to file on them and to go through the whole period. There is also a day of waiting for those. But those are typically done just for the high-profile nominees. They are not typically done for every nominee. There are about 1,200 people who have to be confirmed. So, typically, things are done by voice vote.
Under President George W. Bush, 90 percent of his nominees were actually done by voice vote in the Senate. Under President Obama, 90 percent of those were done by voice vote. Under the first President Trump term, 67 percent of his nominees were done by voice vote. So far, in this Senate, zero--zero for every single nominee, even if it were the protocol officer for the State Department or a legislative affairs person in an Agency or the deputy secretary assistant of something-- literally those who no American other than their families know who they are. They had to go through the full 3-hour process and the intervening day to slow this down.
That has not happened to any President ever in the history of the country--ever. No President has ever faced this kind of obstruction ever for their nominees. We have still done 119 of those by staying and working at night and by staying and working on weekends. We will continue to do this the hard way or the easy way.
Quite frankly, President Trump should have the same respect as every other President in American history. He should be able to get his staff, so we will continue on this process as we already have. We will just keep moving through the process because what we are doing is trying to get the work done for the U.S. Senate.
We have taken on some issues that haven't been taken on in a long time. We did a rescissions package. That has not been done in 35 years. We not only talked about it, but we passed it, and we made it law. We as a body examined some areas, and we said: This seems like wasteful spending to me; we shouldn't do it.
We literally voted, took it out, and saved the American taxpayers $9 billion from this year's budget. That has not happened in 35 years to be able to do that. How did we do that? Well, we identified some areas of waste in foreign aid and said: Do we really need to have this as a top priority?
We took away the funding that was used last year to create environmentally friendly reproductive health education for children in foreign countries. We took away the funding for Iraqi Sesame Street and for the Melanesian Youth Climate Corps. We took away the funding that created the grant for vegan food in Zambia. We took away the funding for the pride festival in southern Africa. We took away the funding for social media mentorships in Serbia and Belarus. We took away the funding for gender diversity for the Mexican street lighting industry.
We took away $1 billion of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When many people said, oh, gosh, this is going to lead to the end of NPR and PBS--and it absolutely is not because, with NPR, 90 percent of it is funded by corporate and private funding already. This was the last 10 percent. Literally, this was something that was attempted to be done in 1983 under the Reagan administration to say: Why do we have federally taxpayer-paid journalists? Why don't we have that in the free market? If it made sense in 1983, it certainly makes sense now. In 1983, there were about four channels. Now, there are thousands. So what Reagan couldn't get done, we just got done.
That is a pretty productive Senate, but we are not close to being done with the things that have already been accomplished just in the last 7 months.
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