{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=F7F786BB-5FEE-4E1D-8F44-FECB299CCECA", "Thune Joins The Hugh Hewitt Show", "2025-12-17", "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 listen the interview.\n\nWASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined the Hugh Hewitt show.\n\nOn confirming President Trump\u2019s nominees:\n\n\u201cDemocrats took unprecedented steps to basically blow up the nominations process. President Trump is the first president in history who didn\u2019t have one of his nominees to a position in his administration confirmed either by voice vote or unanimous consent in the Senate, which is a way of taking noncontroversial nominees and being able to move them to get them in their position.\n\n\u201cThe Democrats were so dug-in fighting President Trump that even the most noncontroversial positions in his administration, they forced us to do the long way. So we spent the first six months doing it the long way. And it just got to a point where \u2026 the president is sitting there, he\u2019s got all these vacant positions, [and] he can\u2019t \u2026 run the government because he doesn\u2019t have his people in place. And I think when people vote for a president, that\u2019s what they\u2019re voting for. They want him to be able to assemble his team and get them in place. So we made some tweaks and changes in the rules that enable us to move them now in stacks, and we\u2019ve got a big stack today.\u201d\n\nOn Senate Republicans\u2019 accomplishments:\n\n\u201cThe president\u2019s agenda, for the most part, was all accomplished in that One Big Beautiful Bill. Whether it\u2019s national security or the border, energy, tax policy \u2026 school choice has been a priority for the movement for a long time. Newborn accounts, childcare \u2026 we basically threw the farm bill in the One Big Beautiful Bill too, so.\n\n\u201cIt actually included the biggest spending reduction, literally, in history, and something that if you\u2019re a fiscal conservative like I am, we\u2019re really proud to be able to point to \u2026 It packs so much into one big piece of legislation, and \u2026 getting that across the finish line was a Herculean task.\u201d\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve processed the president\u2019s noms, and we\u2019ve done 24 \u2026 Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval, which undoes a lot of the Biden damage by repealing a lot of the burdensome Biden regulations, and frees up energy production in this country and a whole range of other things.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve had some bipartisan accomplishments too. So it\u2019s been busy \u2026 in terms of volume of votes and time in session, all that too. But [it\u2019s been] very productive \u2026 doing it all in one big \u2026 package \u2026\u201d\n\nOn the Working Families Tax Cuts:\n\n\u201cI always tell people, if you don\u2019t get national security right, the rest is conversation. So we really made up for the Biden years, when they weren\u2019t funding the military. We put money in there to build a wall at the border and to close the border, which the president has effectively and successfully done \u2026 We needed to make sure that we had not only border wall money, but we had personnel for Border Patrol agents, detention facilities, all the things that we needed to do that were backed up \u2026\n\n\u201cAnd then it\u2019s about making the country more prosperous, and I think the tax policy will be really key to that. I would argue that not only extending the policies from 2017, which included lower rates for families and doubling the child tax credit, and near doubling the standard deduction, and there\u2019s a 199A deduction for small businesses in there \u2026 We also did no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, reduced taxes, you know, for seniors on Social Security.\n\n\u201cI think the tax policy in and of itself is going to be enormously stimulative to the economy. You look at \u2026 bonus depreciation, interest deductibility \u2026 R&D expensing, those are all things that, on the business side, I think it\u2019s going to lead to growth in the economy and better-paying jobs. So I think that people are going to see a better future as a result of the economic pieces of it.\n\n\u201cAnd then there\u2019s a whole \u2026 bunch of other things \u2026 in there \u2026 having to do with \u2026 policies that we think are consistent with a conservative view of how this country ought to be run \u2026 The school choice policies have been something that\u2019ve been a part of our agenda for a long time. You look at these newborn accounts and what a difference that will make in the lives of families and young people who are being born today, to be able to put money aside for their futures. Those are all incentives in this bill that I think are just going to lead to a better quality of life for a lot of the American people.\u201d\n\nOn cutting waste, fraud, and abuse:\n\n\u201cWe did do some of this in the One Big Beautiful Bill \u2026 rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. We did that in the Medicaid program, we put work requirements in \u2026 And then there were states [that] figured out how to game the program and so we clamped down on some of that. We achieved a significant amount of savings there. And then we put in this Rural Hospital Transformation Fund, which if you \u2026 represent rural hospitals like I do, I think the states are going to take full advantage of that in trying to ensure that we\u2019ve got health care that\u2019s accessible to people all across the country, including in rural areas.\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=F7F786BB-5FEE-4E1D-8F44-FECB299CCECA"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.119465032592416, "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"}