{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=C42975CE-38F2-45D2-8CF0-7B708C0BE2AD", "Thune Joins Amna Nawaz on PBS NewsHour", "2025-10-09", "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.\n\nWASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined Amna Nawaz on PBS\u2019s NewsHour.\n\nOn Congress\u2019 responsibility to fund the government:\n\n\u201cAll we need is \u2026 five Democrats to vote with us \u2026 it\u2019s passed in the House, president will sign it \u2026 We\u2019ve got 55 senators currently \u2013 a majority of the United States Senate \u2013 who have voted multiple times now to open up the government.\u201d\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\u201cYou can\u2019t take the ... federal government hostage. This is something that is routine, at least it has been in the past, when you do a short-term funding extension, and the one that we put together is \u2026 nonpartisan, has no policy riders, no Republican priorities in there. It is a straightforward funding resolution to keep the government open until such time as we can complete and finish the appropriations process \u2026 something that when the Democrats had the majority the last four years and while Biden was president, they did 13 different times \u2026\n\n\u201cThis is a hijacking of a process that should be very straightforward, and you shouldn\u2019t take a hostage, like federal workers \u2026\u201d\n\nOn Democrats\u2019 shutdown hypocrisy:\n\n\u201cWhat matters here is the people who get hurt by a government shutdown \u2026 the federal government should not be taken as a hostage. And that used to be a very heartfelt position of a lot of Democrats in the Senate, including the Democrat leader.\n\n\u201cBut now, all of a sudden, things flipped and what\u2019s changed is [Democrats] got a new president in the White House, and it\u2019s a president they don\u2019t like. And the left-wing base in the country is very adamant about fighting this president \u2026 so the Democrat leaders in the House and the Senate have followed that lead.\n\n\u201cBut there are, I think, reasonable Democrats out there who recognize this is a bad strategy and it harms the American people and hostage-taking shouldn\u2019t be something that\u2019s permissible.\n\n\u201cGovernment shutdowns hurt everybody, and it doesn\u2019t matter who gets blamed. [This] shouldn\u2019t be about politics. It ought to be about \u2026 what\u2019s in the best interest of the American people, and that\u2019s getting the government open again.\u201d\n\nOn the consequences of Democrats\u2019 shutdown:\n\n\u201cRight now, we\u2019ve got a government that\u2019s shut down. We got military people who aren\u2019t going to get paid starting early next week, air traffic controllers who aren\u2019t getting paid, Border Patrol agents who aren\u2019t getting paid.\u201d\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\u201cAll that has to happen is we pick up the bill off the Senate desk, five Democrats join us in addition to those who already have, and the government opens up again, and then you don\u2019t have that discussion, everybody gets paid again. That\u2019s the best way to end this.\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=C42975CE-38F2-45D2-8CF0-7B708C0BE2AD"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9257409255951643, "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"}