{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=B299F71B-C198-44E0-94D7-513C68400AD3", "Thune: Senate Overcomes Historic Democrat Blockade to Confirm President Trump\u2019s Nominees", "2025-12-04", "2025", "2025-12", "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, I am very pleased to report that as of yesterday, the Senate has confirmed a total of 314 of President Trump\u2019s civilian nominees.\n\n\u201cAnd earlier this week I filed on another nominations package, which, when passed, will bring our total confirmations to more than 400.\n\n\u201cThat far outstrips total confirmations by this point in President Biden\u2019s term, and in President Trump\u2019s first term as well.\n\n\u201cAnd it\u2019s particularly notable that we\u2019ve managed to beat those first-term numbers when you consider the obstacles the Democrats have put up.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve talked more than once here on the floor about Democrats\u2019 unprecedented obstruction of the president\u2019s nominees this year.\n\n\u201cAnd I really do mean unprecedented.\n\n\u201cFor decades upon decades, the Senate has expedited the consideration of large numbers of presidential nominees, confirming them by unanimous consent or voice vote.\n\n\u201cPresidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for example, each had 98 percent of their civilian nominees confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote in the first term of their presidencies.\n\n\u201c98 percent.\n\n\u201cGeorge W. Bush and Barack Obama each had 90 percent.\n\n\u201cNow, it\u2019s true that Democrats substantially eroded this tradition of bipartisanship during President Trump\u2019s first term.\n\n\u201cAll of a sudden, positions that had traditionally gone by unanimous consent or voice vote were now requiring roll call votes.\n\n\u201cBut even so, both President Biden and President Trump in his first term had more than half of their nominees confirmed by voice vote.\n\n\u201cAnd then there was this year.\n\n\u201cThis year, not one single presidential nominee has been confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote.\n\n\u201cNot one.\n\n\u201cDemocrats have dragged out the process on every single one of the president\u2019s nominations.\n\n\u201cThe Democrat leader tried to justify Democrats\u2019 historic blockade by claiming that the president\u2019s nominees have been, quote, \u2018historically bad.\u2019\n\n\u201cThe only problem with that, Mr. President, is the Democrats have supported a number of the president\u2019s nominees in committee and have even voted for some of them on the Senate floor.\n\n\u201cSo either members of the Democrat Party are supporting historically bad nominees, or something else is going on here.\n\n\u201cAnd I think we know what that is, Mr. President.\n\n\u201cThat something else that\u2019s going on here looks a lot like petty partisanship.\n\n\u201cMaybe you want to call it Trump Derangement Syndrome.\n\n\u201cDemocrats \u2013 and their base \u2013 still can\u2019t deal with the fact that President Trump won last November.\n\n\u201cAnd so they have held up every single one \u2013 every single one \u2013 of his nominations in revenge.\n\n\u201cBut Republicans have not been daunted.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve just continued ploughing ahead on nominations \u2013 helping us rack up a historic number of votes this year in the process.\n\n\u201cAnd in September we took steps to restore Senate precedent and codify in Senate rules what was once understood to be standard practice \u2013 and that is the Senate\u2019s acting expeditiously on largely noncontroversial presidential nominees to allow a president to get his team in place.\n\n\u201cNow both Democrat and Republican presidents will be protected from some of the partisan excesses that we\u2019ve seen from Democrats this year.\n\n\u201c2025 has been a long road, Mr. President \u2013 but I\u2019m very proud to be able to say that, at the end of it, that we are well on our way to confirming more than 400 of the president\u2019s civilian nominees.\n\n\u201cAnd that we have virtually cleared the nominations backlog by the end of his first year \u2013 in contrast to the situation at this point in President Trump\u2019s first term and in President Biden\u2019s.\n\n\u201cAnd when the Senate returns in January, I look forward to continuing to confirm additional members of the president\u2019s team, so that he can continue to do the job to which he was elected by the American people.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:09:11Z"]], "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=B299F71B-C198-44E0-94D7-513C68400AD3"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.4290378894656897, "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"}