Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I missed the conversation on the floor--
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Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you, and thank you to my colleague from Oklahoma.

The issue we are addressing needs to be addressed. The nomination process is entirely broken. People are sick and tired of bringing their expertise to the Senate and basically being an automaton in a nomination factory. So that is why there is great sympathy for us working together to resolve this.

I put forward a somewhat different version of the world from my colleague from Oklahoma and said: Let's do a block of time where multiple people can be debated simultaneously. That alone speeds things up by six to eight times because it is not 2 hours or 120 minutes per nominee. Let's create a motion where we go directly to that block of time, and because of the block of time, you don't have to have cloture on it in order to vote. Let's speed up how we hold those votes.

I felt we could get to wiping out the backlog through some of the agreements that were done before August and by accelerated consideration and preserve the ability to vote on each nominee.

I had concerns about the en bloc because I think we have a constitutional responsibility, if there is a bad apple, to weigh in on that and be accountable to our constituents on whether we favor or disfavor that individual. So I proposed an amendment.

I do appreciate my colleague working to arrange to have a vote on that amendment that said 10 Members in the minority, or minority- majority, could sign a petition to have someone pulled out of a group of 15 if they felt that person merited more scrutiny or presented particular problems.

I heard about kind of the distrust that that might be used to dismantle an entire block of 15, so I am open to modifications of that that could address that. But I was one of the people who said, as written initially, I couldn't vote for unanimous consent to just adopt it. But to consider it on this floor--yes, I can vote for it to be considered on this floor because that is what we should be doing. We should be bringing rules ideas to this floor to be wrestled with in order to make this Chamber work better.

And so I appreciate that the plan wasn't to just try to get UC on the proposal but to get UC to consider it. Why shouldn't we all agree to that? So I am not sure where the reservation is, the holdout. I have heard that there are folks who like the idea of a supernova nuclear option and therefore want to blow up normal consideration of a standing order, of a new proposal standing order.

But I just--I guess, having missed the presentation, if I missed it, from the majority leader, I would say maybe we should take an hour and try to resolve that or adopt what my colleague has said, to iron out the details over the weekend--because it is a big deal. It is a big deal to go nuclear. It is a big deal to adopt a new idea that hadn't been widely circulated until the last few days.

So I cast my heart and my vote with the idea of let's try to figure this out.

I thank the President.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, would my colleague yield for a question?

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