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Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I want to tell you a story about Tina Pierce. Tina grew up on a farm in Idaho. She was the first in her family to earn a college degree.

After earning her degree in accounting, she served in the U.S. Marines. She was deployed in Kuwait as the comptroller for the contingency Operation Desert Thunder.

She earned her MBA from Colorado State University. She graduated at the top of her class. She then became a CPA, a certified public accountant. She has been married 26 years. She has four children. Her husband also served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a colonel.

Why do I bring her up? Well, here is why. President Trump nominated Tina Pierce to be the Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Energy. She went through the process with the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where she was voted out in May of this year 13 to 7--pretty strong bipartisan vote.

She passed out of the committee and then has sat waiting. What is interesting for this is the Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Energy has actually never had a vote in the Senate on the floor of the Senate. It has always been a position that, in the past, went through committee, was approved in committee, and then passed on the Senate floor either by unanimous consent, a voice vote, or what is called en bloc, grouped together with other nominees and passed all in a group.

This is not the Secretary of Defense; this is not the Secretary of Energy or the Secretary of State. This is the CFO for the Department of Energy. It is one of those 1,200 positions that the Senate must confirm but, historically, has always been confirmed in a very fast-track process after they passed out of committee. Especially when they pass out 13 to 7 out of a committee, everyone knows they are going to pass.

You see, that is the way it used to be--but not anymore. My Democratic colleagues have determined that Tina Pierce should be filibustered. So this marine, married to a marine, mom, highly qualified, graduated top of her class has to sit at home and wait as Democrats block every single nominee on the floor. So she waits since May of this year to see if the Senate can open up enough time to have a vote.

Well, that is not the only one. Jonathan Morrison was President Trump's nominee to be the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Jonathan was the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, went on to law school at Notre Dame. He also got a master of laws degree in international business law from University College London.

Over his career, he has worked with automobiles. He has also served as Chief Counsel at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. He is supremely qualified to be able to lead this part of the administration.

He came out of the committee in a vote of 16 to 12, but he also just sits and waits because there is not enough time.

In every administration, there are lots of nominees. There is 1,200 nominees. And everyone knows there are so many nominees, so you pick and choose which nominees you actually want to be able to debate. That is normal in every single administration.

They all have to go through the committee process, but when it comes to the floor, you don't dedicate all the floor time to different, what are called, sub-Cabinet officials. Those get fought out in committee, and then they come to the Senate floor and either pass en bloc or they pass by voice vote or unanimous consent. Or if they are highly controversial individuals, maybe we will have a floor vote on them.

It has been 200 days of this administration. Let me give you some examples of this. What is called a cloture vote, a demand to be able to go through this full, long process--under Bill Clinton, there was zero of those--zero. Were there controversial nominees? Sure, there were. But they worked through the process on that.

Under G.W. Bush, zero cloture votes that were required in the Senate. There were nine under President Obama, but then under the first President Trump administration--38, all of a sudden.

You know what we did as Republicans? We pushed back. And there were 71 under President Biden. It was kind of a tit for tat. Now our Democratic colleagues have determined this is not going to be tit for tat anymore. We are just going to shut the whole place down.

Now under President Trump, 134.

What does this really mean? This really means that we are not moving anyone across the floor unless they actually have 3 hours of floor time. That is a vote on a motion to proceed. That is 2 hours of debate time here on the floor for that person and then another vote after that. It takes a total of 3 hours to be able to do that whole process-- 3 hours for every single person, when you have got 1,200 people.

You would think during that time--that is, the 2 hours of debate time--we would have massive amounts of debate because if these are highly controversial nominees, of course, there is going to be debate on this floor to be able to discuss all these highly controversial people.

Well, let's talk about that. For these sub-Cabinet officials that are there--there has been 109 of them--all of them have been filibustered through the process to say they demanded. The average Democratic debate time for these 109 people has been 2 minutes--actually, technically, 2 minutes 12 seconds.

So 2 hours of time that they have demanded to debate these highly controversial people, and they have allocated 2 minutes 12 seconds, on average.

Well, interestingly enough, 81 of those 109 Democrats actually did zero debate on the floor. This was just about shutting the Senate floor down. That is all it was. This was about attacking President Trump, not acknowledging the fact that he won the election and that he should be able to actually go through the process to be able to have his staff like every other President has had.

Interestingly enough, I have had folks that have said to me: How do you actually fix this? How does this get better? Well, the first way this gets better is, typically, in the past, Republicans and Democrats would sit down together and would say: This is intolerable; we can't actually get to other bills.

You see, right now, to be able to do the 3 hours that it takes to be able to move it just with the nominees that we have in the backlog right now--not counting the 700 more nominees that are still coming in the days ahead--it would take 900 hours the rest of this year to actually move those through across the floor--900 hours.

Well, if you look at the rest of the year, the Senate would have to be actively voting and in process 80 hours a week every single week, only on nominations. That would mean we would not do the National Defense Authorization; we would not do the 12 appropriations bills; we would not do a farm bill, we would not do an FAA reauthorization; we would not do a new tax policy.

We wouldn't do anything else except nominees 80 hours a week. If we did that, we could get caught up on the backlog. But oh, wait. We have to keep doing that the next year and the next just to be able to maintain this.

So when I say this is intolerable and it has never been done in the past, that is what it means. The Senate has to do legislation as well as nominations. This is a situation that my Democratic colleagues have broken the Senate structure. We have got to figure out a way to be able to fix this that works for Republican or Democrat Presidents in the future. Regardless of party, the President has got to be able to move their nominees. And this should not be an issue that once they have gone through committee and been resolved, that they literally can't get to the floor, or that people wait for months and months and months to be able to get a vote on the floor because there is so little time and we are so backed up.

So here is a simple idea: Just like has been done in the past, move folks in groups just like it happened in the past. You go to the first Trump administration, there were the 22 separate votes that were taken en bloc, groups of folks that have all been passed out of committee.

Under the Biden administration, that happened 17 times where Republicans allowed Democrats to be able to lump these individuals together to be able to pass them together.

Under this administration, so far, zero. None.

Under the first Trump administration, 559 of the 1,200-plus people all went through that process. Under Biden administration, 277. This is Republicans and Democrats alike. Now it is zero because my Democratic colleagues, I assume, have just determined they are going to be the resistance. But what they are setting up is a process where in the future, as soon as there is a Democrat President, this is going to be the same thing because Republicans are just going to go tit for tat on that.

That is not right for the country; it is not right for then; it is not right for now.

Very simply, we have got to get back to legislating, which means we have got to allow the President to be able to have his nominees go through the process. We have a constitutional responsibility to advise and consent. Let's do that in the committee process. Let's bring those to the floor in a debate. Let's actually pass or not pass those individuals, whatever this body may determine. But let's, at least, get an up or down vote on every single one of these individuals to be able to get this part of our responsibility checked off.

Because this week, we are also trying to work on the National Defense Authorization. That is an essential piece of legislation we have got to get done. By the 30 of this month, we are supposed to have 12 appropriations bills done. We can't get on appropriations bills, can't work on the National Defense Authorization, the time that it needs, while we are backed up with hundreds of nominees and my Democratic colleagues are blocking, literally, a mom and a marine who is a highly qualified CPA to say they can't be the CFO. Please.

This is all about trying to attack Trump, but what they are doing is actually stopping the country from getting its business done. So let's get this fixed. That is my request.

My colleagues are coming to the floor in the next hour. We are all going to make our case. This is so important that we actually get resolved--not some time--right now, get this resolved.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I want to compliment my colleague from Alabama Senator Britt. I can't begin to tell you how hard she has worked through the August time period.

There is this sense of we are just trying to be able to ram this solution through the Senate. She spent hours on the phone talking to different Democratic Senators--as I did, as multiple other members of our group did--to try to be able to find a pathway to be able to resolve this because that has always been the way it has been resolved. Eventually, it just gets to a point that you talk to each other enough, you figure out a way to be able to work it out; you work it out; and you figure out how to be able to do that. We reached an impasse the first days of August.

Typically, before we actually have a gap to be able to be back home in August, we will pass dozens on what is called an en bloc vote.

That didn't happen this time. We couldn't find that pathway to be able to actually get there. So in frustration, Senator Britt, myself, Senator Budd, Senator Cornyn, Senator Schmitt, Senator Johnson all spent lots of time over August trying to be able to figure out how do we weave out of this, and the idea became: There is a Democratic proposal that is out there that was brought to the Rules Committee in 2023. It was never voted on in the Rules Committee when Democrats actually ran and chaired the Rules Committee. But it was brought to the Rules Committee to say: Let's see if we can figure out how to be able to do this in a better way, and that was to be able to put in the rules to do en bloc voting, to be able to say: If they have come out of committee, they passed out of committee, we know they are going to get passed on the floor. Instead of holding up sub-Cabinet individuals--we are not talking about the Cabinet level--these sub-Cabinet individuals, put them all together in a group and be able to pass them.

We agreed the least partisan way to be able to do this, that is fair to both Republicans and Democrats, is to be able to literally take a Democrat proposal in 2023 and say: Let's finish that out. Let's actually bring that and to be able to bring it for a vote.

The response we got back, overwhelmingly, from our Democratic colleagues was: Yes, we still believe that is a good idea. Let's start it when the next President comes in place.

So in other words, we want to block every single one of President Trump's nominees, but we want to make sure this doesn't happen to us.

It will. So we have got to be able to fix this now.

Interestingly enough, many of my Democratic colleagues that I have spoken to over the past several weeks about this, when I brought up this proposal to say: This is a way to fix it that we think is the best solution for the Senate long-term, they have quietly over the phone said: Yes, we need to get this fixed. We just don't want to be the people to actually fix it. You fix it for the Senate.

We think it is better long term to be able to find a rule that works in a nonpartisan way that resolves it for everybody. We understand full well there will be a Democrat President and Democrat Senate in the future; that they will do en bloc voting like this. Fine. That is the way we did for a century. We didn't have to have a rule to be able to do that. We just came to agreement and did it.

So let's get back to actually operating because we do have serious issues to argue over. We have got lots of arguments about budget. We have $37 trillion in debt. We need to spend more time arguing about that and less time arguing about who the CFO for the Energy Department is going to be when they have already passed out of committee in a large bipartisan vote. So let's have the argument over the hard issues, and let's move the nominees that we know are going to get moved across the floor in a way that makes sense to everybody, regardless of party.

I have multiple other colleagues that are coming to the floor here in just a moment. We want to be able to make the argument to the American people.

I have to tell you, I have lots of phone calls that have come to my office that say: Why can't the President actually move his nominees? Why is this? This seems to be different.

And people may not know all the numbers and the details, but they feel it and go: Why does it feel like he is being treated differently? Well, it is because President Trump is being treated differently by not having a single voice vote, not a single unanimous consent, and not a single time to be grouped together into groups that we know are going to pass. That has not ever happened in this Senate.

And I have had multiple colleagues say: And we are going to keep blocking every single one.

Do you know what? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We are trying to figure out how to be able to get back to our functioning again and to be able to actually operate.

So I have multiple colleagues that will come to this floor, and we will keep making the argument to say: Let's get the nomination process fixed because we have got to get back to legislating more.

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