- 4 days ago
During a Senate roll call vote on President Trump's nominees on Saturday, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) spoke about obstruction to presidential nominees.
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00:00Thank you, Mr. President. Two and a half years ago I was sworn in as America's
00:052000th senator. A pretty unique honor from a kid who grew up in a
00:12working-class neighborhood in Bridgeton, Missouri. And as somebody who
00:17appreciates history, the United States Senate has always been held out as the
00:22greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. It's a very
00:28uniquely American institution. As our founders envisioned what our system of
00:35government looked like, they wanted something that was very different than
00:42the House. And something that you had equal representation as opposed to
00:48proportional representation. This system of checks and balances in a bicameral
00:53legislature, every state no matter the size having two senators, was thought of
01:00very differently and has proven over the course of our nearly 250 years to be a
01:06very important place to protect individual rights and a whole host of
01:12other issues that matter to the American people. There's also been some people whose
01:17names are famous. You had Henry Clay, the great compromiser. You had, of course,
01:26Webster, Calhoun, and Clay as the great triumvirate. Missouri's first senator, Thomas
01:32Hart Benton, was known as Old Bullion. And I want to propose a new name. Someone who
01:39serves currently in the United States Senate. The great arsonist, Chuck Schumer. Chuck
01:49Schumer has single-handedly, more than any senator in the history of our
01:56republic, done more to diminish the importance and significance of this
02:03chamber. I'm going to walk through a few ways in which he's done that. To take a
02:09step back for the folks watching on C-SPAN, for the folks in the gallery, for
02:17over 200 years, for over 200 years, the executive calendar, which is what we're
02:27dealing with today and what this whole debate is about, this executive calendar,
02:33there was no filibuster ever. It didn't happen. It didn't exist. Presidents are
02:43able to come in. They're able to nominate folks. They were done by unanimous consent.
02:48Maybe there was some debate. But to put this in perspective, the judicial, the folks
02:53nominated as judges for the cabinet and other related posts. Judges, for example,
02:59weren't even really subject to the filibuster. Think about this. Clarence
03:03Thomas, perhaps one of the most controversial Supreme Court justices, or that
03:07nomination was, got 52 votes. A filibuster wasn't instituted on Clarence
03:15Thomas. 52 votes and he was confirmed. Any senator could have moved forward with an
03:25effort to filibuster requiring culture and then a vote requiring 60 votes. So then, of course,
03:34you move into the sort of the 20th century. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer grew tired of
03:42that old institution of having to have 60 votes once that started to be employed. So they
03:51decided to change things around here. That you only needed 51 votes for anything other than
04:03a Supreme Court nominee. Lit the fuse. Lit the fuse. Then, of course, now even for Supreme
04:15Court nominees, it's only 51. That happened in the 21st century. For the entirety of the
04:2820th century, we didn't have this nonsense that we're doing here today. I mean, even as
04:33you go back into the 1990s and into the 2000s, this executive calendar that we're dealing with
04:42was done by unanimous consent in voice votes. There are people literally being voted on
04:47today. I don't think the ambassador to Uruguay has been voted on in 50 years. We just did
04:52that.
04:56So, Chuck Schumer rode shotgun with Harry Reid to upend the executive calendar as it relates
05:05to judicial nominees. Now, Chuck Schumer is doing that to all these other positions. We've never
05:16seen this in the history of our republic. With over 1,000 people that need to be Senate confirmed,
05:23the Democrats are filibustering and requiring cloture for every single one of them. Because
05:32of those stall tactics, the 30-hour rule was changed to two hours. But this is all about
05:39delay. And why? Well, there's a couple reasons. One is the Democrats at this point are catering
05:49to a very, very radical and growing element of their party. And they're competing to be
05:57the greatest resister against President Trump. They can't believe he got back in. They can't
06:04believe it. They tried to throw him in jail for the rest of his life. They invented this
06:10Russiagate nonsense in the first term. But the American people sat in that jury box. They
06:17weighed all the evidence. They saw all the shenanigans. And they said, you know what? We want our country
06:21back. We can't believe that you would weaponize the Justice Department against parents who showed
06:27up to school board meetings or Catholics or your chief political rival. They rejected it. They
06:32rejected it because they want reform. And so now President Trump is offering candidates who are
06:39reformed candidates for different positions, but they don't want to do it. And you know what? Vote no,
06:43whatever. But this level of obstruction has never been seen before. It's never been seen before.
06:48And don't even get me started on what Chuck Schumer would do to the legislative filibuster. He's
06:54already on record. His colleagues are on record, many of which I've talked to privately and can't
06:59believe they would actually do it. But if they ever are in the position that the Republicans are in
07:03right now, with a president in the White House, a Republican Senate, or a Democrat Senate, and a
07:07Democrat House, they will blow up the legislative filibuster. They've all voted to do it. Save Joe
07:15Manchin and Kirsten Sinema who are no longer here. Would my colleague yield to a question?
07:22No. Thank you. They won't do it. They won't yield at all. And by the way, I've had very, I won't
07:32mention who, conversations with my Democrat colleagues who pretend to care about this
07:39institution and who are on record for that, on record for voting to end the legislative
07:44filibuster. Oh, it's just for one issue. It was just for the voting rights issue. Give me a break
07:51because you know exactly what comes next. DC and Puerto Rico come into the union, federalizing our
07:57elections, packing the Supreme Court, put a shot clock on the republic on that day.
08:03So here we are now. That's the legislative calendar. We're in the executive calendar.
08:11They already lit the fuse on judicial nominees. And now Chuck Schumer is lighting the fuse on this.
08:20And I've got news for you. A reckoning is coming because we are going to get back. The Republicans
08:28in this chamber are going to get back to where the Senate always was, where the executive calendar
08:34isn't being utilized like this. And so whether it's, you know, because a rule change is coming.
08:43If I have anything to say about it. And by the way, in a few hours, we may be recessing. And President
08:48Trump is going to get his recess picks. You have lit the fuse. And let me give you another example of what
08:57Chuck Schumer has done. Last year, for the first time in the history of the republic,
09:06in articles of impeachment were delivered over to this chamber. All senators are seated. All of us.
09:13In every single instance that articles of impeachment have come over to this chamber,
09:18if the person was alive or still in office, there was a trial. It happens to be in the Constitution.
09:24That is part of our job. There are only three calendars. The legislative calendar,
09:29the executive calendar, and the impeachment calendar.
09:34The fuse was lit yet again. For the first time in our country's history, Chuck Schumer made a motion to
09:42dismiss the articles without a trial. And the Democrats, with a simple majority vote, went along with it.
09:49I don't ever want to be lectured by any senator on that side of the aisle about how much they care
09:57about the institution of the Senate. All three calendars would be lit ablaze, set on fire by the
10:06great arsonist and his merry men. So what are we going to do about it? This is the charge to my Republican
10:15colleagues today. The charge is, we are not going to let you do this to the Senate. We are not going to
10:23let you destroy this place. We are going to get back to a place it's always been. And one more example.
10:33I heard Chuck Schumer on the floor earlier today, lauding the passage of appropriations bills.
10:38In my first two years in this place, we spent exactly 0.0 minutes on appropriations bills.
10:52A blutarski. Nothing.
10:57Leader Thune has made it a priority to open this place up, to have amendments. In fact, when I carried
11:04the rescissions package, I wasn't seeking to box anybody out. Offer your amendments. Let's have free
11:10and open debate. We didn't see that when Chuck Schumer was in charge. Not once. So, lit the fuse
11:19on judicial nominees. Lit the fuse on the executive calendar. Lit the fuse on the legislative fell buster.
11:27Lit the fuse on regular order.
11:28He will go down in the annals of history as someone with total disregard for this chamber,
11:39the work we're charged to do when we're elected. But I think Republicans have a chance to course
11:45correct today. And I hope we do it to get back to a place that can actually function. With that,
11:53Mr. President, I yield back. Mr. President. So, just as a reminder to my colleagues,
12:00we should refer to each other in the third person or as a senator from, for example, Ohio. And I also
12:06just want to remind my colleagues that no senator in debate shall directly, indirectly, by any form or
12:12words impute the other senator or other senators in question or motive or unworthiness of becoming of
12:19being a senator. Mr. President. I recognize the senator from Oregon. I was hoping my colleague
12:28would stay on the floor to have a little bit of discussion about the topic he just raised.
12:34Because there seemed to be some missing elements in his discussion. And isn't that kind of what happens
12:42here? Where we hear from our leadership about all of these terrible things the other side is doing.
12:52And we just kind of swallow that hook and sinker rather than actually looking at the record.
13:01Now, one of the pieces left out of his story was 1974, 100 senators on this floor said,
13:11we're going to create a special fast track, filibuster free for one single purpose, reducing the deficit.
13:21And think of Robert Byrd of West Virginia. And Robert Byrd was an adamant, adamant advocate
13:30for the filibuster. Unfortunately, he had been very supportive of using the filibuster to block
13:36civil rights bills. But in general, he was dedicated to making sure that it stayed in place.
13:44And even he joined 99 other senators to say, hey, we should have a special fast track solely for
13:53reducing the deficit. That was 1974. At that same time, that same bill created the Congressional Budget
14:01office. So we would use honest numbers in putting forward spending bills. Because if we're going to
14:09actually reduce the deficit, we had to quit using smoke and mirrors to pretend that what we're spending
14:15is less than it really is. So let's go forward 22 years to 1996. And in 1996, we were in the middle of the
14:30first term of the Gingrich Revolution. The election of 1994 had been a dramatic success for Republicans in the House,
14:41picking up dozens of seats with an agenda for America. And in that agenda was something called
14:49the Line Item Veto. And the Line Item Veto was the idea that we would delegate our constitutional
14:56responsibility of the power of the purse to the President of the United States of America, and say
15:04the President can decide what's spent on what programs. And the Supreme Court said, oh, no, you can't do that.
15:12You have a constitutional responsibility under the separation of powers, under the checks and balances.
15:21Congress, by law, establishes what must be spent on each program, not the President of the United States.
15:31Certainly the President gets a role. The President provides a budget. The President has to sign the
15:36spending bills. But Congress could not take the power assigned to it and simply hand it over to the
15:43executive. That's the way you end up in a strongman state. And so the Supreme Court wiped out in 1996 the,
15:53well, they canceled, if you will, the line item veto power that Congress tried to give the President.
16:00And so the Republican team controlling the House and Senate said, well, we have another idea.
16:08And that other idea is a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Now, that happens to require two-thirds
16:17of both bodies here to vote for it, and then three-quarters of the states to do a constitutional amendment.
16:24It easily flew through the House of Representatives.
16:27All very good. It comes over to the Senate. And we need 67 votes for that. And there's 66 votes.
16:39The 67th vote was potentially the chair of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield from Oregon.
16:47And Senator Hatfield said, this is a bad idea. Here's why it's a bad idea. Sometimes we're at war,
16:55and we need to spend more money. Sometimes we're in recession, and we need to spend more money.
17:02And we do decide every single year, and we're in the majority, Republican majority, we decide every
17:07single year how much is going to be spent through the spending bills, the appropriation bills.
17:13And we decide through the revenue bills how much is going to be raised. So we already have
17:18the power to do a balanced budget in the years that it should be balanced. But we need to retain the
17:24power to address these emergencies. It's kind of an interesting story in that Senator Hatfield,
17:32for standing on this principle as the chair of the Appropriations Committee, was vilified.
17:39He was so vilified for defending the responsibility of the power of the purse held here.
17:47And in fact, he was so vilified that he even received a message from his son-in-law
17:56with a picture of his granddaughter and saying, for her sake, you should do this.
18:00He then went to the majority leader, Senator Dole, and said, if you feel so strongly this is right,
18:12and clearly I feel it's a mistake, I'll resign. And Senator Dole decided, no, we're not going to ask
18:25you to resign. We're not going to suggest that's the right answer. And so it fell one vote short.
18:33There is kind of an interesting twist to this story. Because Oregon did not have a law that allowed
18:40a governor to appoint a replacement. So had Senator Hatfield resigned, there would have been 99 senators.
18:48And then you would have only needed 66 votes for the balanced budget amendment.
18:56But that did not transpire because Senator Dole turned Senator Hatfield's offer down.
19:04So then, what happened? Well, a little bit of frustration among the Republican majority.
19:11Their line item veto had been knocked down by the Supreme Court. Their constitutional amendment
19:16had not cleared the Senate. And they said, we really want to do a massive tax bill,
19:22particularly giving huge breaks for the richest Americans. And they said, ah,
19:31but we can't do it. We can't get it done. We can't get it done. Why not? Because the Democrats won't
19:37agree to massive tax breaks for the richest Americans. So we won't be able to get the 60 votes we need
19:44to be able to pursue this path. And then what happened? Well, Majority Leader Dole and others
19:56conferred and said, let's do a nuclear option. And let's take this strategy, this tool that we created
20:06in 1974 to reduce deficits, and let's repurpose it and allow it to be used to increase deficits. Of course,
20:17not at all what the 100 senators had voted on in 1974. Well, that was pretty dramatic to proceed
20:28to take a tool, reconciliation, invented in 1974 to reduce deficits and to say it can be used to increase
20:40deficits. Well, yes, so dramatic, in fact, that it couldn't be done unless they overturned the opinion
20:53of the parliamentarian. So they fired the parliamentarian. That's what the Republicans did.
21:01They fired the parliamentarian and they brought in a new parliamentarian. And his name was Robert Dove.
21:07Robert Dove. Now, Robert Dove had been here in 1974. He knew about why they passed this bill with 100
21:17senators to have a fast track with no filibuster was only for decreasing the deficits. But where had
21:26Mr. Dove been working? He had been working for the majority leader, Robert Dole. And so he took and he
21:35came in and he ruled or provided the recommendation to the chair that it was just fine to completely
21:44repurpose this 1974 tool called reconciliation for decreasing the deficits could be used to increase
21:53deficits. That was a nuclear option. Wow. Now, my colleague didn't mention any of that. He talked about
22:01lighting the fuse. Lighting the fuse as if Democrats had been degrading the structure of this institution.
22:12But I would suggest maybe there's responsibility on both sides of the aisle. What was done in 1996
22:19was a dramatic, dramatic, well, contravention of the very core of the understanding that every Democrat
22:32and every Republican had agreed to. It was a deal broken. Deal broken in the exercise of power politics.
22:42Or let's go forward to 2008. And this man named Barack Obama ran for president. He was a member of the Senate.
22:56And he was elected. And at that point, something dramatic happened. And that is the minority leader
23:07who decided to undertake a dramatic blockade of President Obama's nominees.
23:22And couldn't fill the National Labor Relations Board. Couldn't get the Labor Secretary into place.
23:28The list went on and on and on. Well, Democrats didn't respond with a nuclear option. They responded with,
23:36let's work this out. Let's preserve. Let's preserve the supermajority on nominations.
23:43But to preserve it, we can't abuse it in this fashion. Just the number of blockades of nominations
23:51soared dramatically. This instrument that had really almost never been used on nominations,
24:00it started being used routinely on the Republican side of the aisle. I was left out of the speech you
24:05heard a few minutes ago. So we negotiated it. We pleaded. It was like a nine-month process.
24:16And finally, we all met in the old Senate chamber. No staff present. I don't know if there was anyone
24:28anyone to even record the comments for history. And we basically talked to each other in very real terms
24:36about let's preserve this supermajority on nominations. But it can't be that the minority uses that as a blockade
24:47against a president to keep qualified people from being put into office.
24:58And agreement was reached
25:00that that that blockade would be dialed back enormously. And I recall that a month or so into
25:13that, there was us on the verge of the minority blocking a very qualified individual that there was no
25:21justification for. And I remember Senator McCain grabbing the arm of a fellow colleague coming down
25:29the aisle over here and saying, we mustn't do this.
25:36We agreed to not be irresponsible in blocking qualified people. And that person just
25:43got the 60 votes and went through. All good and well, like we had resolved this conflict and preserved the
25:53supermajority until the minority leader changed his mind and said, I don't care how qualified a nominee is
26:05from President Obama for the D.C. Circuit Court. We are going to block anyone, anyone from being assigned to fill those seats.
26:16Well, that was the final straw. And as much as Harry Reid tried to, as Majority Leader, say back off, don't do that.
26:30That is a violation of the agreement we reached in the old Senate chamber. The minority leader said, nope,
26:39we're not going to allow Obama to put a single justice on the D.C. Court.
26:46And a few arguments, policy arguments, were made by the minority leader to support the position. He said,
26:53I think they have enough justices already. We don't need to fill those additional positions.
27:01But that's not an argument had ever been used here, that even though courts had a huge backlog,
27:08they didn't need the additional justices. No, it was just a plain out power move to block a President
27:14of the United States from putting people on the D.C. Circuit Court.
27:17Why was that the target? Well, for one reason, the D.C. Circuit Court considers a lot of the national
27:27issues go through the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. And for another, a lot of folks who eventually get
27:33nominated to the Supreme Court serve on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. So that makes it kind of,
27:40well, a pretty important place. But this pretty important place where justices consider pretty
27:47important issues and sometimes have a chance to be recognized as someone who might be a good
27:53candidate for the Supreme Court was blocked by the minority. And to speed all the efforts to undo that,
28:04the minority said, nope, regardless of qualifications, we're going to back up
28:08the minority leader and not allow any justice to be appointed, no matter how qualified they are.
28:16So I'm just adding to the conversation that my colleague began, who's proceeded to throw in kind
28:26of a dialogue of saying, all the obstruction here stems from one side of the aisle, the blue side of the
28:34aisle. I'm suggesting that there have been moments where both sides have stretched their power.
28:42There have been moments when both sides have sought, and sometimes successfully, to resolve that conflict.
28:50But in the end, there have been some big moments in which the Republicans have torn down the system.
28:57So that may be true for the Democrats as well, but it might be helpful to have a more balanced conversation.
29:06And while we're at this dialogue, recognizing factors that have occurred on both sides of the aisle,
29:14let's talk about something else that never happened in U.S. history until it happened
29:24by the Republicans refusing to hold a debate and a vote on a Supreme Court nomination.
29:32It had never happened until the last year of the Obama administration, when a vacancy became
29:42open due to an untimely death, and the President nominated a candidate to fill that seat, and Republicans
29:52said, we're not even going to allow a debate or a vote.
29:57First time in the history of the United States of America.
30:01I was just reading a column the other day that referred to this as the stolen seat, and I noticed
30:07it because that's what I called it at the time. I said, this is wrong. Once one side steals a seat from
30:14a President, it will be horrifically difficult to fix that problem. Because if the Democrats have the
30:22same chance to do the same and balance things out, now you just have a tradition of stealing seats.
30:29You have a Republican President and a Democratic majority that blocks debate on a nominee
30:37until the next election, hoping that you'll keep that seat empty until there's a Democrat in the Oval
30:42Office. Well, that just means we've locked in obstruction.
30:47So I came to this floor at 6 p.m. and started speaking and addressed my comments to the majority
30:57leader across the aisle and the minority leader and said, please get together. There's been several
31:04recommendations for fixing this, because if this seat is stolen in this fashion, kept empty,
31:11until the next President comes in, we'll never be able to fix it. There's no path for fixing it. And I proceeded
31:23to make that plea through the night, up until cloture ripened, that is a motion to close debate,
31:31ripened the following morning, 15 and a half hours later. Why would I stand on this floor for 15 and a half
31:36hours later? Because I was asking my Republican colleagues, do not tear down this institution.
31:45Well, that's three examples of what the Republican side has done that didn't come up in my colleague's
31:51speech. But let's talk about a fourth. And then I see my colleague from Illinois is here, and I'm going
31:58to defer to him. The fourth was just recently, in which, for the first time ever since the 1974 act,
32:12we passed a bill, and I say we passed a bill, the Republicans passed on a partisan line bill,
32:19a spending reconciliation bill that will create deficits beyond a 10-year window.
32:25They had already blown up the agreement from 1974 that there could be no deficits created
32:36in a 10-year window. They blew that up in 1996, as I referred to. But then they proceeded to blow up,
32:41just weeks ago, the second half, the second pillar of that bill, which there would be no deficits after
32:47a 10-year period. And then they blew up the third pillar of that 1974 act,
32:55which was we'd use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office in laying out what
33:00a bill costs. So I say to my colleague across the aisle, who was speaking before me, you pointed out
33:07things that you feel Democrats stretch the boundaries and damage this institution. But you left out
33:15innumerable cases that I have just pointed to.
33:19So isn't it time to not do one more damage to this institution and instead get together a group from
33:26each side to wrestle with the issue at hand? It is my understanding that as of this moment, this day,
33:33there's almost exactly the same number of nominees that have proved to date under the Trump's
33:41administration as there were under the Biden administration a similar number of days into
33:45his administration. Almost exactly the same number. So I think the hyperbole across the aisle is
33:52profoundly exaggerated. But let me yield to my colleague from Illinois, who stands ready to share
33:59share a few thoughts.