WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Breitbart News exclusively he has everything lined up to once and for all break the Democrat logjam of qualified nominees of President Donald Trump in the Senate and will move to confirm 48 of them in the first of many big batches of nominees as soon as Thursday.
Thune over the past two weeks took the procedural steps necessary to alter Senate confirmation procedure so as to crumble the Democrat blockade led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has for the first time in American history prevented the confirmation of any presidential nominees by voice vote or unanimous consent in the U.S. Senate. This unprecedented action by Schumer and Democrats has even applied to broadly popular presidential nominees who have bipartisan support, and it’s these nominees that Thune is moving first up. The 48 nominees moving to final Senate confirmation on Thursday are expected to include people like Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, among dozens of others with bipartisan support.
“As we’ve discussed in the past, President Trump deserves to have his team members in place so he can enact his agenda which the American people voted for last November,” Thune said in a phone interview with Breitbart News on Tuesday afternoon. “He’s the only president on record in history to not have a single civilian nominee confirmed via voice vote or unanimous consent at this point in his presidency. So the Democrats’ long, unprecedented blockade has gone on for way too long and it’s going to end soon and we intend to start that this week. So what will happen is, on Thursday, we’ll have a bloc. It will be 48. It’s the first bloc that we will move in bloc so that this blockade, these dilatory tactics, this unprecedented obstruction that the Democrats have engaged in has to end. So we took the steps to do that. We set it up last week, and we will conclude it this week. Then in the future we’ll be able to do a lot of the Trump nominees in batches, if you will, as opposed to individually, which is what the Democrats have forced us to do, and in ways that have never been done in history, in the past.”
Thune first formally announced he was undertaking this change to U.S. Senate procedure to bypass Democrat obstruction in an exclusive oped earlier this month for Breitbart News. The move came despite Republicans offering to Democrats a bipartisan workaround using a framework many Democrats had previously embraced, but Democrats rejected even that, preferring instead to parade around like anti-Trump crazy people and blocking the swift confirmation of many nominees critical to ensure the national security of the United States. In fact, Thune even told Breitbart News in this interview that Democrats throughout this obstructionist blockade have been jeopardizing American national security in their illogical hatred of the president and his supporters. Thune said that because of how ridiculous Democrats have been, all 53 U.S. Senate Republicans have proven to be unified behind the moves he’s made to break this open.
“That’s absolutely accurate, the Senate Democrats, because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome, are putting America’s national security interests at risk all around the world,” Thune told Breitbart News. “These are key positions that need to be filled, and in the past they would have been filled by unanimous consent because everybody recognized that a president who wins is a duly elected president and won a huge mandate in an election and deserves to have their team in place. That’s always been the standard. That’s always been the practice up until now. So this Schumer blockade has got to come to a close, and for all the reasons that you mentioned, chief among those always is national security. We live in a dangerous world. We need representation in a lot of these key posts around the world today, and the Democrats have been blocking it now for going on nine months since the President took office. So it’s got to come to an end. We tried and made an effort to see if there was a way they would work with us on a rules change that would enable us to do this and restore to the practice that’s been employed by both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate in the past, and for both Republican and Democrat presidents. But they weren’t having it, so we got to do this with Republican votes. Thankfully all our Republicans understood what was at stake and we’ve all hung together. We had all 53 Republicans to do this and we’re going to finish it this week.”
After this big tranche of 48 nominees from Trump is confirmed on Thursday, Thune said what’s next is even bigger blocs of Trump picks so the U.S. Senate can clear out the “backlog.” Thune added that Democrat behavior is “almost pathological” in their clear and apparent hatred of Trump.
“Yeah, there will be, and we’re going to try—we’re into the first 48 because they’re bipartisan,” Thune said when asked if more and bigger groups of nominees are on the way afterward. “Schumer’s answer to this is these are historically unqualified nominees. Well, if they’re historically unqualified, ‘Chuck, why are Democrats voting for them coming out of the committee—in some cases with big numbers?’ There are 24 of these nominees who came out of the committee with a majority of the Democrats on the committee voting for them. So this first 48 is going to be all Democrat-supported one[s]. They’re going to be bipartisan nominees that will be clearing, but then we’re going to clear the backlog and the next tranche will be much larger because it will catch us up. So we’re probably looking at another file. The follow on vote to this one will be a much larger group of noms. But we just got to break this backlog. We have to stop this obstruction. I understand the pressure Schumer’s under from his political base because this Trump Derangement Syndrome is—it’s beyond. I tell people, it’s almost pathological, but we can’t allow that to keep [Trump] from getting the people in these positions so they can carry out their responsibilities not only to keep the country safe but to keep it strong and hopefully more prosperous in the future.”
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