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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his statement. I would like to join in the chorus for just a moment and note two or three things that have not been mentioned on the floor by the other side. In fairness, I think they should.
I have listened to several Republican Senators today, with the pie charts, come to the floor and express concern--even outrage--at what is happening in this Chamber. There is some legitimacy to their complaint. There are a lot of things that need to be changed.
I join in with my colleague from Oregon to say we ought to put a group together to try to calmly come up with changes and Senate procedure to bring us back to the stature this Chamber once had. Today, we don't have it, and we should. There are several things I would like to mention briefly.
If you are talking about denying a voice vote or a rollcall to an individual seeking a nomination, I call to mind what happened with our colleague at that time, JD Vance, the U.S. Senator from Ohio, who announced when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee that he would no longer allow U.S. attorneys to go through the voice vote. At that point, he said they should go through the procedure we are now using for all nominees. He literally stopped the process of choosing U.S. attorneys for President Biden at 63. There are over 90 U.S. attorney positions in the United States.
So he did exactly what is being complained about by Republican Senators, saying that we can no longer use the voice vote or unanimous consent to pick U.S. attorneys.
Let the record reflect, when President Trump was in his first term, every one of his U.S. attorneys was chosen by voice vote, no record votes. Democrats were in control and gave that option to President Trump. And then Vice President Vance had an opportunity to stop it and did. He said at the time he wanted to ``grind the Department of Justice to a halt.'' I quoted that while he was standing on the floor right there. He didn't deny it. He had been quoted in the press.
When you talk about balance and fairness in reforming the Senate, it goes both ways.
Secondly, do you remember when Anton Scalia died on vacation and there was a vacancy at the U.S. Supreme Court? Do you recall what happened? That vacancy was protected by the Republican Senate leader, Senator McConnell, for 10 months so that Obama would not have an opportunity to fill that vacancy. He wanted to make certain that was done by President Trump in his next term. There is another illustration of departure from common practice and precedent for political advantage.
But the last point that I want to make is one that came by as I listened to the Senator from Arkansas come to the floor and talk about the treatment of Republicans under his experience in the Senate.
We have something in the Senate called a hold. What that means, basically, when your name makes it to the Calendar, the Executive Calendar here, which means you have gone through the background investigation at the White House, you have gone through the committee process, you have been chosen by the committee, and you come to the Calendar to be considered for a position in our Federal Government. There is still one last hurdle--not just a vote on the Senate floor, but the possibility of a hold. Individual Senators can put a hold on a nominee indefinitely.
One of the most egregious examples that has happened in modern times relates to the Senator from Arkansas. Let me read from an article by Frank Bruni in the New York Times, June 6, 2016:
In early 2014, after decades of government and nonprofit work that reflected a passion for public service, Cassandra Butts got a reward--or so she thought. She was nominated by President Obama to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas.
It wasn't an especially high-profile gig at the crossroads of the day's most urgent issues, but it was a longstanding diplomatic post that needed to be filled, and she had concrete ideas about how best to do the job.
``She was very excited,'' her sister [Deidra Abbott, told me] said.
The Senate held a hearing on her nomination on May 2014, and then . . . nothing. Summer came and went. So did fall. A new year arrived, then another new year after that.
When I met her last month--
Mr. Bruni wrote-- she'd been waiting more than 820 days on the Senate Calendar to be confirmed. She died suddenly two weeks later, still waiting. She was 50 years old.
The delay had nothing to do with her qualifications, which were impeccable. It had everything to do with Washington.
The woman says:
At another point Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, put a hold specifically on Butts and on nominees for ambassadorships to Sweden and Norway. He had a legitimate gripe with the Obama administration over a Secret Service leak of private information about a fellow member of Congress, and he was trying to pressure Obama to take punitive action. But that issue was unrelated to Butts and the Bahamas.
Cotton eventually released the two other holds, but not the one on Butts. She told me that she once went to see him [personally] about it, and he explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama's--the two first [met] . . . at Harvard Law School . . . and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president.
Cotton's spokeswoman did not dispute Butts' characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career.
That's Washington for you.
A hold of 820 days. A woman who waited on the calendar patiently for this ambassadorship to the Bahamas passed away from leukemia.
So, when we sit down and talk about bringing civility and common sense back to the Senate, let's bring in more than just the topic of the votes as to whether there will be record votes or whether there will be voice votes. That is an important issue, but it is not the only issue. Let us show civility, one to the other--Democrats to Republicans and Republicans to Democrats.
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