{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=E9423183-BEFB-42FF-96A3-774D7DFA5761", "Barrasso: Senate Must Change the Rules for Confirming Nominees", "2017-10-31", "2017", "2017-10", "Republican", "House", "WY", "John Barrasso", "B001261", "www.barrasso.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014 Today at a Senate press conference, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, delivered the following remarks on the need to speed up the confirmation process for nominees after needless delays by Democrats.\r\nAccording to Barrasso, if Senate Democrats won\u2019t respect the standard that was set in the previous Congress \u2013 when Democrats were in charge \u2013 then it\u2019s time to vote to force that change.\r\nExcerpts of Senator Barrasso\u2019s remarks:\r\n\u201cThe Democrats continue to try to obstruct President Trump in getting his team in place.\r\n\u201cBy this date in the Obama administration, they had twice as many nominees confirmed as we have by this date now in the Trump administration.\r\n\u201cThis is a process that is designed by the Democrats to delay the president from getting his team in place to the point that 47 times, we\u2019ve had to file cloture on nominees \u2013 which of course burns significant amounts of time on the floor of the United States Senate.\r\n\u201cIn comparison, when you look at the number of times cloture had to be filed up to this date in the administrations of both President George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush, as well as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama \u2013 it was a total of six cloture votes compared to 47 for President Trump.\r\n\u201cThis is an intentional delay.\r\n\u201cTo give you an example: Last week on the Senate floor, there was a judge who was nominated. The Democrats wanted all of this time to be spent, and in fact only 20 minutes was actually used of all of those hours that couldn\u2019t be used for anything else.\r\n\u201cOnly 20 minutes was spent talking about that judge, all by the Republicans, all very positive. And then when the vote was finally done on the floor of the United States Senate, 28 Democrats in favor of that judge.\r\n\u201cThat tells you this is a mainstream nominee with bipartisan support. It is just delaying on the part of the Democrats to slow the process.\r\n\u201cI believe it is time to change the rules of the Senate, to change the rules so that President Trump can get his team in place.\r\n\u201cThere are two different ways to do it.\r\n\u201cOne is to go back to what we had in 2013 \u2013 in the 113th Congress \u2013 which was a bipartisan agreement that lowered the number of hours after cloture: certain judges to two hours; members of the administration to eight hours; for Supreme Court and Cabinet members, 30 hours.\r\n\u201cThat was bipartisan.\r\n\u201cIt is time to do that again.\r\n\u201cIt is time to take the vote \u2013 either to back what we did in a bipartisan way in the 113th Congress or to go to what we need now because it\u2019s time to vote either for the nominees or for a rules change.\u201d\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 ###", 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=E9423183-BEFB-42FF-96A3-774D7DFA5761"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.7928339764475822, "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"}