{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=A9C09FB6-4962-40C5-901E-9E5F8917943F", "Thune Joins Martha MacCallum on Fox News", "2025-10-10", "2025", "2025-10", "Republican", "Senate", "SD", "John Thune", "T000250", "www.thune.senate.gov", "thune", "https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases", "scraper", "Clickhere to watch the video.\n\nWASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined Martha MacCallum on Fox News.\n\nOn Congress\u2019 responsibility to fund the government:\n\n\u201cDemocrats have to decide whether they want to deliver the five votes that we need to open up the government. We have \u2026 55 out of 100 senators. The House has passed it, it\u2019s sitting on the desk at the Senate \u2026\n\n\u201c[Democrats] have to think long and hard about what they\u2019re doing, and unfortunately, the consequences of this are becoming very real \u2026 for a lot of federal workers. We want our troops to get paid, we want our TSA agents to get paid, our Border Patrol agents to get paid, air traffic controllers to get paid.\u201d\n\nOn Democrats\u2019 shutdown hypocrisy:\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve made it very, very easy. It\u2019s a nonpartisan, short-term, clean continuing resolution to keep the government open. Democrats now have voted against it seven times \u2013 something that they voted for 13 times under Joe Biden when he was president and Chuck Schumer was the majority leader in the Senate.\n\n\u201cThis is a routine thing. What they\u2019ve decided to do is hijack it, and they\u2019ve consistently now, seven straight times, voted it down.\u201d\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\u201cDemocrats have concluded \u2026 that they think this is a political game. I mean, the statement that Chuck Schumer said \u2026 to the press about, \u2018this gets better for us every day.\u2019 I mean, that is a cynical statement, and honestly, they ought to be ashamed, because this is a real thing for a lot of families across this country that could be completely eliminated.\n\n\u201cAll they simply have to do is vote for the bill that\u2019s right at the Senate desk. All we need is five of them right now to get it done.\u201d\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\u201cThe president, like us, just wants to see the government opened up again \u2026 The Democrats are asking for $1.5 trillion in new spending. They\u2019re asking for free health care for noncitizens in their counter proposal. Those are not things that\u2019re going to go anywhere. It\u2019s not serious.\n\n\u201cWe have in front of them a serious proposal to open up the government. They just simply need to take it, and then let\u2019s go to work on health care.\u201d\n\nOn the consequences of Democrats\u2019 shutdown:\n\n\u201cI think the president \u2013 and to give him credit for this \u2013 for 10 days now, they have held off on making hard decisions with regard to agencies and departments and moving money around and deciding what gets prioritized and what doesn\u2019t, and which employees are essential and get paid and which don\u2019t.\n\n\u201cThose are all hard decisions, and the Democrats have put the administration in that position. But for 10 days, they have resisted making any decisions like that. [The administration is] now going to be forced to make those kinds of decisions, and that\u2019s really unfortunate.\u201d\n\nOn the preserving the legislative filibuster:\n\n\u201cEvery single Democrat, with the exception at the time of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema \u2013 voted to get rid of the filibuster, and every single one of them today, if they had that same opportunity, would vote to keep the legislative filibuster, because it\u2019s situational for them \u2026\n\n\u201cThis is the ultimate hypocrisy, and we\u2019ve been consistent. The filibuster is something that protects the minority in the United States Senate. It enables us to work in a constructive, bipartisan way to get things done, and it\u2019s just something that we\u2019re not going to do \u2026\n\n\u201cWe don\u2019t have to do it. All we have to have are five courageous Democrats with backbone who are willing to cross the far-left activist groups who are calling the shots, and they\u2019re dancing to their tune, and just come up here and vote to get the government open. It\u2019s that simple \u2026 this isn\u2019t a complicated thing.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:32:54Z"]], "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=A9C09FB6-4962-40C5-901E-9E5F8917943F"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0507621336728334, "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"}