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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the Senator from Wyoming was just on the floor and spoke about the schedule of business here in the U.S. Senate, particularly the question of nominations. Senator Barrasso is my friend. We disagree on a lot of political things, but we respect one another, and I certainly respect him.
There is an important chapter that he just left out of recounting the history of the nominations process in the Senate. I call it the JD Vance chapter.
Listen to this: When Donald Trump was in his first term, he nominated over 90 U.S. attorneys. Every one of them passed with a voice vote, with the possible exception of one in Massachusetts. Every one of these passed with a voice vote. In other words, we didn't require any rollcalls. We filled these vacancies for U.S. attorneys.
Then came Joe Biden. Under the Biden Presidency, a decision was made by one Senator, JD Vance of the State of Ohio. He came along and said: I no longer will allow you--it is my right as a Senator to stop it. I will no longer allow you to have a nominee for U.S. attorney go through without a rollcall.
That sounds like a very minor request, but with potentially over 90 of these rollcalls, we found ourselves backed up in a situation where we couldn't approve any U.S. attorneys. We didn't have the time on the calendar to do it because of the JD Vance requirement.
I came to this floor--this very spot--eight times, pleading with then-Senator JD Vance: Please, don't do this. We have comity and understanding on U.S. attorneys. We did under Trump in his first term, and we certainly did in the early stages of Biden, but now you are requiring rollcall votes on each of the U.S. attorneys, and it is going to create an obstacle to progress on the floor of the Senate. Eight times I came to the floor, asking unanimous consent for Senator Vance to withdraw this demand. He refused each time.
Then he went off to run for Vice President, and while he was gone, running for Vice President, I came to the floor again and asked the Republicans who were remaining in the Senate Chamber to allow me unanimous consent that nominees for U.S. attorneys will not go through this rollcall process. Unfortunately, a number of now-sitting U.S. Senators on the Republican side came to the floor and objected. They wanted to keep the Vance rule in place. I warned them that the obstacles they were creating under President Biden that were unprecedented and had not been seen under President Trump in his first term would come back to haunt all of us, and now they have.
This requires us to sit down at some point and have an understanding moving forward not just on nominees and whether there are rollcalls on the floor but on fundamental and basic questions as to whether or not a minority position, for example, on an important Agency or council is going to be respected.
What the Trump administration has done, for example, in many places on commissions and in Agencies is to eliminate the Democrats--to fire them from their jobs--and leave vacancies unfilled. Then the Republicans come to us and say: Well, we have Republican nominees for the spots, the Republican spots.
And we say: What about the Democratic nominees?
They say: We are not going to allow you to call any of those.
There has got to be some understanding and comity, and we think that grown-ups should be able to resolve this issue, but the representation of what our problem is this morning did not include those two elements and many others. I hope we can resolve this in a favorable way for the benefit of the American people, but there is a history behind it. Fundamentally, we are in the minority now on the Democratic side, and we don't believe that the rules that the Republicans insist on should be to their benefit only; they should benefit both political parties. Unfortunately, we are in a position where that is not happening.
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