{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=69AA1603-F36C-4271-80BD-5936F5E2C3BA", "Thune: Americans Deserve Better Than Democrats\u2019 Shutdown Dysfunction", "2025-11-18", "2025", "2025-11", "Republican", "Senate", "SD", "John Thune", "T000250", "www.thune.senate.gov", "thune", "https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases", "scraper", "Clickhereto watch the video.\n\nWASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor:\n\nThune\u2019s remarks below (as delivered):\n\n\u201cMr. President, after 43 days, the longest government shutdown in history is over.\n\n\u201cShellshocked government employees are getting paid again.\n\n\u201cThe air travel situation is improving.\n\n\u201cNutrition programs are back on a secure footing.\n\n\u201cBut the damage remains.\n\n\u201cHow many of those government employees now getting paid again are staring at credit card debt taken on to cover necessities during the month and a half they worked without pay?\n\n\u201cTheir newly restored salaries don\u2019t contain extra to cover the interest on that debt.\n\n\u201cHow many small businesses are struggling thanks to the hit that their business took during the shutdown?\n\n\u201cHow long is it going to take to catch up on the 43-day backlog in government services that the shutdown created?\n\n\u201cThe pain this shutdown caused was immense.\n\n\u201cAnd all of it, Mr. President \u2026 all of it could have been so easily avoided.\n\n\u201cRepublicans offered Democrats a clean, nonpartisan funding extension.\n\n\u201cWe did not make a single demand.\n\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t ask for a single partisan policy.\n\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t add a single partisan policy rider.\n\n\u201cWe simply asked Democrats to extend current funding levels for a few weeks so that we could continue bipartisan work on appropriations.\n\n\u201cInstead, Democrats chose to plunge the country into chaos because the far left of their party demanded a showdown with President Trump.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s right, Mr. President.\n\n\u201cAll of this pain? All of this profound financial stress? All of this economic damage?\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s because the far left demanded a showdown with President Trump.\n\n\u201cAnd Democrats fell in line.\n\n\u201cMr. President, it\u2019s disturbing enough that the Democrat Party was willing to shut down the government for 43 days \u2013 by far the longest government shutdown in history.\n\n\u201cBut what is even more disturbing is the fact that a number of Democrats were prepared to let this shutdown continue even longer.\n\n\u201cEven as lines stretched around the block at food banks and air travel grew ever more precarious, progressive Democrats pushed to embrace the shutdown \u2026 forever, as far as I can tell.\n\n\u201cThe senior senator from Vermont published an op-ed calling for a continued shutdown and continued opposition to President Trump \u2013 even though the president had exactly nothing to do with the clean funding extension that Republicans were proposing.\n\n\u201cAnd the junior senator from Connecticut spent the last week of the shutdown advocating for continuing it and fretting that ending it would damage Democrats\u2019 \u2018brand.\u2019\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\n\n\u201cDemocrats\u2019 brand.\n\n\u201cNeither senator seemed to spend a minute seriously considering the incredible damage their shutdown was doing to hardworking Americans and to our country.\n\n\u201cIndeed, as we know from their own words, a lot of Democrats saw the pain of working people as leverage for Democrats in this shutdown \u2013 a useful tool to be deployed to advance the Democrats\u2019 political goals.\n\n\u201cMr. President, I am grateful that we finally got eight Democrats to join Republicans to reopen the government \u2013 and to spare the American people from further pain.\n\n\u201cBut the fact that a month and a half into this shutdown, 39 Democrats still voted to keep the government closed remains deeply disturbing.\n\n\u201cAre Democrats going to continue hamstringing the necessary work of government at the behest of the far left?\n\n\u201cAre their partisan politics going to continue to obstruct the government\u2019s functioning?\n\n\u201cWe have a lot of work left to do \u2013 starting with the need to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year beyond January 30.\n\n\u201cAnd there\u2019s a lot more we could accomplish too \u2013 from improving our health care system to passing a farm bill.\n\n\u201cBut not if the vast majority of the Democrat Party continues to put partisan politics above the wellbeing of the American people.\n\n\u201cI hope Democrats will be content with their record-breaking 43-day shutdown and will now be able to turn back to the business of the American people.\n\n\u201cThe American people deserve better than the past month and more \u2026 of Democrat-imposed misery.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:52:45Z"]], "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.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=69AA1603-F36C-4271-80BD-5936F5E2C3BA"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.458495855331421, "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"}