{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=342AF793-22E6-4094-86FC-44A2A8EA17A0", "Barrasso: Senate Should Return to a Better Way on Nominations", "2017-11-01", "2017", "2017-11", "Republican", "House", "WY", "John Barrasso", "B001261", "www.barrasso.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "\u201cLet\u2019s change the Senate rules and go back to the process that Senator Schumer supported in 2013 and 2014. Today the schedule allows us to do one or two nominations in a typical week. If we go back to the 2014 standard, we could clear multiple nominations in a day.\u201d Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso\u2019s remarks. WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014 Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor on how the Senate should speed up the nomination process by returning to the rules for debating nominees that the Senate used three years ago.\r\nExcerpts of Senator Barrasso\u2019s remarks:\r\n\u201cThis week, the Senate is moving through a series of votes to fill vacancies in the federal appeals courts.\r\n\u201cPresident Trump has nominated highly qualified, mainstream judges and legal scholars to do these jobs.\r\n\u201cDemocrats have responded \u2013 once again \u2013 with delay and with obstruction.\r\n\u201cIt is clear to me that we need to change the rules in the Senate that govern how we debate nominations in this body.\r\n\u201cAll year, Democrats have been putting up roadblocks to nominations.\r\n\u201cThey have forced the majority leader to file cloture, so that we can confirm nominees like these four judges.\r\n\u201cAs of last Friday, Democrats have forced the Senate to file cloture 47 different times.\r\n\u201cNow there were only six cloture votes at this point for the previous four presidents.\r\n\u201cThese are the kind of hoops the Democrats have been making the Senate jump through in an effort confirm President Trump\u2019s nominees.\r\n\u201cThis procedure has been set in place to allow for debate.\r\n\u201cDebate is a good thing in the Senate as long as debate is actually occurring.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a chance for Senators to stand up, say what they like or what they don\u2019t like about a nominee.\r\n\u201cNow if no one wants to debate, we should just move things along and have the vote.\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s one Senate rule that allows for as much as 30 hours of debate time on presidential nominations after we\u2019ve actually had the cloture vote.\r\n\u201cIn reality, very little of that time actually has been being used for the debate.\r\n\u201cIn the past, both sides would agree to waive the time requirements and to move on to other Senate business.\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s happening now is the Democrats are insisting on cloture votes and then they\u2019re insisting we use hour after hour \u2013 even when there\u2019s no one here \u2013 to debate the issue or the person in front of us.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to end this pointless spectacle.\r\n\u201cThe United States Senate used to be called the world\u2019s greatest deliberative body.\r\n\u201cDemocrats have turned it into the world\u2019s most paralyzed deliberative body.\r\n\u201cWe have more than 125 nominees for various jobs who\u2019ve had hearings in committee, who have testified in committee, who committees have voted on, who have cleared through the entire committee vetting process, and are now waiting for a vote on the Senate floor.\r\n\u201cMost of these people have bipartisan support.\r\n\u201cThey will be confirmed easily and eventually.\r\n\u201cThey should be confirmed immediately.\r\n\u201cThere should be no reason for Democrats\u2019 stalling tactics except to once again slow down the pace of other progress in the Senate on legislative issues.\r\n\u201cLook at what happened with one judge last week.\r\n\u201cScott Palk was nominated by President Trump to serve on a United States District Court.\r\n\u201cHe had bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee.\r\n\u201cThat was in June \u2013 more than four months ago.\r\n\u201cApparently that\u2019s not good enough for the Democrats.\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re only interested slowing down the work of the Senate.\r\n\u201cSo we had a cloture vote on this nominee \u2013 every Republican and 27 Democrats voted for him.\r\n\u201cSo he had bipartisan support.\r\n\u201cWe still had to allow all of this wasted time for the debate.\r\n\u201cWe couldn\u2019t conduct any of the other business in the Senate during the time because the Democrats insisted that we use all the debate time.\r\n\u201cNow they could have very easily agreed to waive the rules as we do and go straight to a vote.\r\n\u201cThe Democrats refused.\r\n\u201cSo how much of that time \u2013 that 30 hours \u2013 did the Democrats actually spend on the floor debating this person\u2019s qualifications to be a federal judge?\r\n\u201cNone. Not one Democrat came to the floor of the United States Senate to talk about that judge.\r\n\u201cThere were fewer than 20 minutes of total talk on the floor of the Senate actually talking about the judge.\r\n\u201cThe Senate had to waste hours and hours when we could have finished debating in less than 20 minutes.\r\n\u201cThings take time in the Senate \u2013 we understand that.\r\n\u201cThere is no excuse for Democrats abusing the process to make things take even longer.\r\n\u201cDemocrats aren\u2019t using the rules for debate, they\u2019re not using the rules for deliberation, it is only for delay.\r\n\u201cIt hasn\u2019t always been this way, and there is no reason it should continue this way.\r\n\u201cThe Senate had a different standard for nominations a few years ago, that was in the 113th Congress.\r\n\u201cIn 2013 and 2014, the Senate allowed just two hours of debate after cloture was invoked on nominations for district court judges.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s two hours actually more than the Democrats spent debating this judge\u2019s nomination last week.\r\n\u201cThe rules said that we have up to eight hours to debate executive branch nominations below the cabinet level.\r\n\u201cAnd then for cabinet secretaries, for judges on the Supreme Court or for circuit courts, it was the full 30 hours of debate.\r\n\u201cThirty hours now is what we allow for every nomination today \u2013 and Democrats have shown that in most cases it is far too much time because even though we have to spend all of the time, they use very little of talking about the nominees.\r\n\u201cWe need a fair debate on every nomination. The procedure from 2013 and 2014, is one that was fair.\r\n\u201cNow the way that the Democrats are wasting time today to keep us from doing our work is not fair.\r\n\u201cI believe it is time to return to the rules for debating nominees that the Senate used three years ago.\r\n\u201cA president\u2019s nominations of qualified people to important jobs was never meant to be a tool for delay in the Senate\u2014or to be an obstruction in the way Democrats have been using them.\r\n\u201cThese rules that we used in 2013 and 2014 were the result of a compromise.\r\n\u201cDemocrats controlled the Senate at the time; a Democrat, Barack Obama, was in the White House making the nominations.\r\n\u201cRepublicans agreed to make these changes to the rules.\r\n\u201cIt was part of a bipartisan group and I was part of that group. There were eight senators \u2013 they worked on this compromise. Four Republicans, four Democrats.\r\n\u201cSenator McCain and Senator Alexander were part of that group.\r\n\u201cSenator Schumer, who is now the Democrat leader, was part of this group.\r\n\u201cAnd there was overwhelming support for these changes on both sides of the aisle.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to do it again.\r\n\u201cLet\u2019s change the Senate rules and go back to the process that Senator Schumer supported in 2013 and 2014.\r\n\u201cToday the schedule allows us to do one or two nominations in a typical week.\r\n\u201cIf we go back to the 2014 standard, we could clear multiple nominations in a day.\r\n\u201cThe Republican Senate has been busy this year, and we\u2019ve made progress on behalf of the American people.\r\n\u201cWe have passed 15 resolutions rolling back destructive Obama-era regulations using the Congressional Review Act, signed into law by the president.\r\n\u201cWe passed a budget that will help us give Americans a raise by cutting their taxes, giving us an opportunity to do the kind of tax relief, tax reform, tax reductions, tax cuts that the American people are looking for.\r\n\u201cWe need to do more.\r\n\u201cIt is time for Democrats to stop abusing the rules just to delay the process.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to go back to the previous standard of debating nominations.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to pick up the pace, and do the job the American people expect us to do.\r\n\u201cNow if Democrats have a different approach and don\u2019t want to accept the standard of debate that was set in the previous Congress, then I believe it is time for us to force that change.\r\n\u201cIf Democrats maintain their lockstep opposition to real progress on judicial vacancies and other nominees, we should give them the chance to vote on their continued obstruction.\r\n\u201cWe can vote on these nominees in a straightforward and efficient way, or we vote to return to the precedent of the 113th Congress.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the choice. Either way, it is time to vote.\u201d\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=342AF793-22E6-4094-86FC-44A2A8EA17A0"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.7865289226174355, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}