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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the unprecedented obstruction by my Democrat colleagues, which brings us here today, in the activity we are going to see on the floor this week and next.
Article 1, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution requires that every officer in the United States receive the advice and consent of the Senate. This is a very important function. At times, it can seem tedious, I suppose, on the floor when we are voting on some of these, but this is contemplated by our Founding Fathers to be a really important part of the process of getting good, qualified people in important positions in the executive branch.
With that power comes responsibility, a duty. And the Democrats have completely abandoned that duty to provide the advice and consent; instead, moving forward with complete obstruction.
``Unprecedented,'' now that term gets thrown around a lot in this town. Every day somebody says something is unprecedented. It is not actually unprecedented. This really is unprecedented.
In the almost 250 years of our country, and, of course, a little bit sooner than that when we had the first Congress--a little bit later than that when we had our first Congress, we have never seen anything like this, like not even close. The minority leader would rather burn all the norms down than do it like we have done it before. Even though that process has sort of eroded to some degree in recent years, it was never anything like this.
For those of you watching at home or in the Gallery here today, and we are glad to have you, the Senate kind of operates in three calendars--let's put it in those terms--three operational modes.
One is the legislative calendar when we have bills that come up--the NDAA, the continuing resolution, appropriations bills, that kind of stuff.
Let's be clear. What the minority leader has already said he would do and what Democrats in this Chamber have already voted for is to completely eliminate the legislative filibuster. If they were in charge, if they were in the position the Republicans are in right now, they would blow it up; it is gone. DC is added as a State, maybe Puerto Rico, court packing--they voted on this stuff. I am not making this up. They campaign on this stuff. That is what the minority leader would like to have happen to the legislative calendar.
Let's talk about the impeachment calendar. Well, last year, we saw Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas impeached by the House of Representatives. The Articles of Impeachment are transferred over here. We are all sitting at our desks. For the first time in the history of this country, there wasn't a trial.
Now, trials look a little bit different. Sometimes they are in committee, and sometimes they are in front of the full Senate. But there is not a single instance in the history of this country where the person who was impeached who either was still alive or in that office hasn't had a trial. So they blew that up.
Now we are dealing with the Executive Calendar, which is essentially where all the personnel decisions are made. We approve Ambassadors, Cabinet Secretaries, judges, U.S. attorneys, marshals, all that stuff. There has been not a single instance, not one time has there been a unanimous consent granted in this Chamber--not once. That has never happened before.
We will talk about some of those details here as we move a little bit further along in this debate, but just to add a little meat onto the bones, in defiance of the vision of the Founders, the Democrat obstruction leaves President Trump on pace to have just 426 nominees confirmed by the end of the 119th Congress. That is if we are working at a pace which is unprecedented. I don't mind it. We can be here. I am not afraid of hard work. But if we are here as much as we have been here just to get to that number, which is lowest in history--less than half of what Joe Biden had at this point in time, 817; or even President Trump's first term, 715. So at the end of the first Congress, those are the numbers. So it is not even close. It is less than half of the total number.
By the end of his term, we are projecting that a mere 872 confirmations--so the full 4 years--would actually get through. That would be the first time in the history of the country that that number would fall below 1,000, compared to Joe Biden's 1,175 and President Trump's first term, which is about that same number, about 1,200, and President Obama's staggering number of almost 1,500. So it is not just slow; it is sabotage, echoing the darkest days of the most partisan feuds we had threatening our young Republic 200 years ago.
Democrats have required cloture 360 percent more in President Trump's first term--in this term's 200 days than in his first. So 137 nominees have been subjected to it--nearly double Biden's 71 and far beyond Obama's paltry 9.
In the past, over 50 percent of every President's nominees were confirmed via voice vote or unanimous consent--until this year, where President Trump has received 0.0--Blutarsky. That is unprecedented.
Under Obama, in his first 200 days, 292 nominees passed by voice vote alone. President Trump has just 135 confirmed, all via overcoming-- except Marco Rubio--overcoming filibusters. Every single one, save the first, has been filibustered.
To put that in perspective, Clarence Thomas--perhaps the most controversial Supreme Court judge as far as that vote went--got 52 votes. It wasn't even filibustered. All of these are being filibustered, including the general counsel to the Department of Transportation.
The average time from nomination to confirmation is a glacial pace of 94 days--nearly double President Trump's first term of 54, worse than Biden's 70, and a far cry from Reagan's efficient 25 days. We have shattered records with the most Senate session days in rollcall votes in modern history--126 days in the first 200; more than Biden's 121-- yet the backlog swells: 139 nominees on the Executive Calendar, 153 in committee, 786 not yet received.
This obstruction is antithetical to our constitutional design. You can have problems with nominees. You can vote no. You can even filibuster some of them. But to filibuster all of them and not have a voice vote on any of them is a symptom of something else--Trump derangement syndrome. They can't get over the fact that President Trump actually won. They thought that by coming on this floor, as the minority leader did so often, and calling half the country MAGA extremists, trying to bankrupt him and his family and throw him in jail for the rest of his life--they thought that thing was over. But the American people sat in their own jury box, they watched all of this nonsense unfold for the last 4 years, and they rendered their own verdict, and it was for reform; it was for the very kinds of people President Trump is putting up for these positions.
So to subvert that democratic process, the sand has been thrown into the gears of our Republic in a way that we have never seen before. That is what we are here to fix. The Democrats have turned the cooling saucer of the Senate into a deep freezer.
But here is the good news: A great thaw is coming. The Republicans in this place are going to return the Senate back to what it was always meant to be able to do, which is to actually function and vote on confirmations. It is not that tall of an ask. But, again, blinded by TDS--and quite frankly, if you talk to some of my Democratic colleagues, like I have privately, they understand that this is a real problem. They know that this is wrong. But they can't be seen by their increasingly radical base doing anything that would be perceived as helping President Trump.
So here we are. The conditions have been set, the landscape has been made, and it is time for action. I would argue that this isn't actually even a new phenomenon; this has been a slow-moving disaster 25 years in the making.
After the 2000 elections, Democrats met at a private retreat to strategize how to maximally obstruct the Republicans--25 years ago. A couple of leftist Harvard professors concocted an idea: Filibuster the Executive Calendar.
The minority leader wasn't done there. Just yesterday, he blew up our entire system on voice voting in the Senate. When push came to shove, he would rather blow up all the norms of this place to hold on to the power that is slipping away from him. He is going to have another test when it comes to a continuing resolution, but we are dealing with this right now.
The decisions of the minority leader over the course of the last 25 years has led us to this place. So if anybody uses the term ``gone nuclear,'' just understand we are having to deal with the nuclear option that has already been executed on the Senate Chamber, which is to say we are filibustering everything, and there is no unanimous consent on anything. That is the nuclear option, and we have to react to it.
One final note here. What we are really trying to do is restore the balance and using a profile that was submitted by a couple of our Democrat colleagues in the last year or two. In their words--and this is, by the way, voting en bloc--their words, not my words:
The slowdown of the confirmation process that we've seen in the Senate on the last several administrations is preventing key officials from taking up their positions.
The en bloc proposal being referred to is--``This commonsense reform will help improve efficiency and make sure we're able to fill positions that are vital to our national security, economic success, and more.''
When the Democrats proposed that solution very recently, 62 percent of Biden's nominees had already been confirmed by voice vote. Think about that. Two-thirds of his people were in place, and they were calling for the reform. Guess how many have been confirmed by voice vote now. Zero. Zero percent.
So we are going to take them up on their offer of reform. I appreciate the majority leader moving this forward to restore, again, the very important balance that our Founders knew was necessary for this Republic to survive. America demands no less.
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