Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, he is right. He is asking for unanimous consent, and we don't have unanimous consent. We do not have unanimity.
What we do have, and Senator Lankford is right, is now a critical mass of people who are willing to entertain changes to the way that we process nominees. That is a pretty big deal. That is a pretty big deal.
This would be the first major bipartisan rules reform, I think, in a political generation, maybe several political generations. And it is not your usual suspects of moderates who might be able to get you guys to 60 but a pretty wide swath of U.S. Senators on the Democratic side to try to reform the rules on a bipartisan basis. And we are achingly close to doing this like adults.
It is not lost on me on 9/11 and after the terrible political assassination of Mr. Kirk that we have a special obligation to demonstrate that politics is a substitute for violence and not a precursor to violence. We have to demonstrate that we can be adults.
So we were achingly close to a deal, but I am afraid that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have run out of patience.
I understand the overall argument about the number of nominees who are in a backlog. I understand that argument. I am not talking about that. I am talking about they just want to go today. They want to leave today. People have flights today. It is Thursday, and it is not 5 p.m.
So were we to work a weekend to try to land this airplane, that would be beneficial to the country, to the body, to Republicans and Democrats alike. We are actually very close, and Senator Lankford knows that. I think he is as frustrated as I am about how achingly close we are to behaving like adults.
I don't know who it is or what the dynamic was, but about an hour ago, everybody just said: Nah, I don't care how close we are. We are just going to do this because we are going to start to lose Members. We are going to start to lose momentum. The weekend is hard. Maybe we are going to get yelled at from the left; you are going to get yelled at from the right; and we can't withstand that so we just have got to go through with it. It is a damn shame.
Maybe this exercise builds a little muscle memory for at least exploring how to have a bipartisan negotiation. Maybe there is some silver lining to this. Maybe there is some understanding that this institution actually matters, especially in this polarized and divided time. But I have to tell you, I am deeply disappointed at the extent to which Members on our side of the aisle and your side of the aisle put themselves in a position of some political peril to try to stabilize the country and be the ballast that everybody needs across America.
We were trending well. We were trending well. I know how negotiations go. They go up and down. They go sideways. They stall a bit. People get a little irritated. But we really were trending well. And I am legitimately shocked that we are like 94 percent of the way there, and somebody just woke up and said: Do you know what? Never mind. We are going to do the thing we were planning on doing originally.
So hope springs eternal, but this is a deep disappointment. And it didn't have to be this way. All we had to do--and I am going to offer this consent later, but I want everybody to understand what this consent means. I am going to ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote upon reconsideration with respect to Executive Calendar No. S. Res. 377 be at a time to be determined by the majority leader, in consultation with the Democratic leader, no earlier than Monday; and that if cloture is invoked upon reconsideration, the postcloture time be deemed expired.
What does that mean? It means that you would have kept your optionality to go nuclear on Monday and not have lost a thing. The leader would have been able to go nuclear on Monday if negotiations never went anywhere, if they went sideways, if they tanked, and no time would have been lost.
So the imperative to kind of get this done on a certain timeframe, we tried to respect and said: Fine. We will just deem the 30 hours expired. We will accommodate your imperative to get this done if you needed to get it done by the end of next week. We said: Sure, keep negotiations open. And we ran a hotline on that, and it cleared our hotline.
We had some very difficult conversations with Members who hate this idea. But just to keep the aperture open to renegotiate and to preserve the majority's prerogative to move forward with some pace, we accommodated that.
I thought, Great. We are trending well. We are going to wake up in the morning; we are going to get on some conference calls; and we are going to see whether there is a pathway.
I don't know whether there would have been a pathway, but I know today that the majority party in the U.S. Senate decided to foreclose the possibility of bipartisanship, and that is a real disappointment to me.
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Mr. SCHATZ. Right? That is what you do. If you have got the votes, you just sort of move through the process of taking the vote.
What they are asking for is unanimity, and we don't have it. And so if you are interested in enacting this on a bipartisan basis, there is a process for doing that. It is available to you. But, again, it is more a matter of running out of patience than running out of time. We are leaving probably this evening, and then we have Friday, Saturday, Sunday off--not off. I understand people work weekends. Whatever. But not here, let's say. And then our first vote will be 5:30 on Monday. There is time. There is just no desire to go through the process. Right?
So it is true--I am not actually sure that you would have 60 votes for that, but there is a way to test it, and that is to file cloture on a new standing order or a new resolution or whatever the procedural pathway is.
What Senator Lankford is asking us to do is to have unanimity for a rules change to have the Senate not vote on individual nominations. Right? That is 15 at a time, and you have to go yes on all of them or no on all of them. And I don't love that idea, but I was willing to entertain it as a sort of matter of principle to try to sort of stabilize this body. But they have run out of patience, not run out of time.
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Mr. SCHATZ. 1, S. Res. 377, be at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Democratic leader, no earlier than Monday, September 15; further, that if cloture is invoked upon reconsideration, the postcloture time be expired; finally, that it be in order for the majority leader to make a point of order prior to the cloture vote upon reconsideration of Executive Calendar No. 1, S. Res. 377.
This would buy us the time we need and not cost the leader anything.
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