The High Price of Democrat Obstruction

Senator James Lankford went to the Senate floor and laid out the case against the unprecedented Democrat Obstruction of President Trump’s nominees.  We are not talking high profile nominees like Supreme Court Justices or Cabinet Secretaries, but basically all the ones appointed by the President that need to be confirmed by the Senate.

First, Senator Lankford laid out the problem:

Now, what's happened? Remember I argued that we had 13, 14, 15 people held up in cloture in a year. This year so far there have been 64 nominations held up in a cloture vote. That is 64 days in the Senate we could do nothing else but sit here in waiting. Now it wasn't for debate. It may sound like it's being held for 30 hours of debate during that time period. Debate normally didn't happen. Most of the time this chamber was just empty. It was just 30 hours were demanded to shut down the body as a whole, 64 in this year. What has brought us? It's brought us more animosity. It's brought us more division and more frustration.

This is not just some petty political game.  It has the effect of undermining the government.

In the meantime, we've got agencies all over this town that can't answer a question because the bureaucrats are waiting on a Senate-confirmed individual to be able to lead that, to be the secretary, under secretary, deputy secretary, whatever the task may be, the counsel for that particular agency. So they sit and wait. So our constituents that are trying to get a permit in certain places or trying to get an answer or trying to get disaster relief, all that they can say in the office is we can't do that until we get a Senate-confirmed position in this place, but we can't get Senate confirmed positions in place until my democratic colleagues will actually allow individuals to actually come up and be debated on.

This dysfunction of the Senate affects the entire country and Senator Lankford calls for bipartisan efforts in the Senate to fix these problems which are damaging the entire nation.

I believe the Senate is moving gridlock from here on this Capitol Hill all across the city and across the nation. The reason for that is how we do nominations and the length of time on nominations. It’s time for the Senate to fix the Senate’s rules.