{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=34557B8B-FA4E-497C-AD04-28AD11E574BB", "Barrasso: Time for Senate Democrats to End Their Charade and Vote on Judge Kavanaugh", "2018-10-03", "2018", "2018-10", "Republican", "House", "WY", "John Barrasso", "B001261", "www.barrasso.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "It's now all about the politics of personal destructionThe American people deserve better than this. It's time for the Democrats to end their charade  before they do more harm to the Senate, to the Supreme Court and to the United States of America.\r\n   Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso's remarks.\r\nWASHINGTON, D.C. Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) spoke on the Senate floor calling on Senate Democrats to end their charade and move forward with a vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve as associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.\r\nExcerpts of Senator Barrasso's remarks:\r\nI rise today to speak about the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the United States Supreme Court.\r\nHe was nominated on July 9  86 days ago today.\r\nEven before he was nominated, a number of members in this body stood and said they would oppose the nomination  not even knowing who he or she might have been.\r\nAfter the name came out that evening, other members of the Senate said they would oppose that.\r\nThat's what Senator Schumer said. He said he would oppose it with everything that he had.\r\nIt used to be that we could disregard language like this as empty rhetoric. Not anymore.\r\nNow we know exactly what Democrats had in mind from the very start.\r\nWe have seen the kind of smear campaign they've been planning from the very beginning.\r\nWhat I've heard from people at home in Wyoming is that they didn't think things could get any lower in Washington D.C.  until they saw this.\r\nDemocrats have done everything under the sun to delay Judge Kavanaugh's nomination and to tarnish his reputation.\r\nIt began with misrepresenting Judge Kavanaugh's sterling judicial record.\r\nThat didn't work.\r\nThen, they unfairly complained that they didn't have enough documents by Judge Kavanaugh.\r\nWhen that didn't work, they shifted to surprise attacks on his character.\r\nThe only thing they've accomplished is to set a new low for how Democrats treat people in Washington D.C.\r\nThere's a way we do things in the Senate to make sure we can fairly and fully investigate nominees for important jobs.\r\nDemocrats have absolutely rejected this bipartisan tradition.\r\nThey hid information for more than two months.\r\nThen, after Judge Kavanaugh had gone through four days of confirmation hearings, Democrats leaked that information to the press.\r\nInformation that they had been sitting on and hiding from the American people, hiding from Republicans on the committee, hiding from the judge himself.\r\nThis isn't the first time we've seen Democrats try to change the rules when it comes to judicial nominees.\r\nDemocrats really do have a double standard.\r\nThey do it time and time again.\r\nThey want one set of rules when there's a Democratic president, and a totally different set of rules when there's a Republican president.\r\nDemocrats have had for years what's known as the Biden Rule.\r\nThis Biden Rule said you shouldn't confirm a Supreme Court nominee once the presidential election is in full swing.\r\nDemocrats wanted that rule in place when George Bush was president.\r\nOnce President Obama was in office, Democrats wanted to pretend they never said it.\r\nThey wanted a totally different set of rules for considering nominees for a Democrat president.\r\nThen we had the Reid nuclear option.\r\nThat's when Democrats decided and voted to get rid of the filibuster for confirming judges and other nominees.\r\nDemocrats set the rule when they were in the majority, when there was a Democrat in the White House, and they wanted to confirm people that were nominated by President Obama.\r\nAs soon as a Republican came into the White House, the Democrats that voted to change the rule, now complained when the rule that they changed was applied to them.\r\nNow what we see is the Schumer Rule.\r\nDemocrats took the normal process for how we review nominees, and they threw it out the window.\r\nDemocrats' new rule is this: Defeat the nominee no matter what.\r\nDemocrats are willing to do whatever it takes to delay, to disrupt, to intimidate, to obstruct this Republican nominee.\r\nDemocrats haven't just thrown out the standards for how we do our work here.\r\nThey have absolutely trampled on common, human decency.\r\nIt was bad enough when Democrats were just trying to delay things. They demanded reams of paperwork.\r\nWell, senators have been given access to 500,000 pages of records from the judge's time as a judge and throughout his career in public service.\r\nThat's triple the amount of information that they've ever gotten about any other Supreme Court nominee.\r\nAfter Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, he responded to nearly 1,300 written questions from senators.\r\nThat's more questions than we've had for every other Supreme Court nominee in history  combined.\r\nJudge Kavanaugh has served on the Circuit Court here in the District of Columbia, the second highest court in the land, for 12 years. He's written opinions in 300 cases.\r\nIf anyone wants to know how he'll act as a judge, they should look at how he's already acted as a judge for the past dozen years.\r\nThese are the documents that matter. These are the ones that tell you how he approaches being a judge.\r\nPeople can look at the 13 cases where the Supreme Court adopted Judge Kavanaugh's reasoning. That's how much respect other judges and justices have for his careful and compelling decisions.\r\nWashington Democrats don't seem to care about any of this.\r\nDemocrats got the documents that they asked for  so they just changed their demands. You can see how transparent Democrats have been by looking at what they said last week.\r\nAs late as last Friday morning, the Democrats were saying that we should pause for a week.\r\nThat's what Senator Schumer, and Senator Feinstein, and other members of the Judiciary Committee said. Let's pause for one week.\r\nAs soon as Republicans said that we would do that, Democrats started saying it's still not good enough.\r\nThey said it doesn't matter what happens this week, they're still voting no. Because it was never for them about finding the truth. For many, it was never about the name of the nominee, because they came out opposing him before his name was even nominated by the president.\r\nThis has always about the far left wing of the Democrat party doing as they've described it, whatever it takes to push their talking points. It's now all about the politics of personal destruction.\r\nThey don't seem to care much about what they do and how they damage the people involved.\r\nThey don't care about the damage they're doing to the Senate, or the damage they're doing to the Supreme Court.\r\nThe American people deserve better than this.\r\nIt's time for the Democrats to end their charade  before they do more harm to the Senate, to the Supreme Court and to the United States of America.\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=34557B8B-FA4E-497C-AD04-28AD11E574BB"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8047479204833508, "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"}