Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said in a Breitbart News exclusive interview that he has everything set up to move a block of 48 Trump nominees through the Senate for confirmation as soon as Thursday, the first step in breaking a Democrat logjam that has prevented hundreds of nominees from being confirmed using the normal methods.
The process of changing the rules to stop Democrats from slow-walking virtually all of President Donald Trump's nominees has taken the last two weeks, but Thune is adamant that the obstruction tactics end so that Trump can have his nominees in place.
“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 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."
Thune said that the block of 48 will be the first in history, but that it's necessary because of the Democrats' obstructionist tactics, which are also unprecedented.
"So what will happen is, on Thursday, we’ll have a bloc," he said. "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.”
It's kind of surprising that Republicans in the Senate have put up with these obstruction tactics for as long as they have.
Trump has been in office for nine months; it is about time that they do something to break the blockade.
Thune even told Breitbart that the Democrats are "putting America’s national security interests at risk all around the world" just because they have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“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," he said.
"We live in a dangerous world," he added. "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."
After Democrats rejected a bipartisan solution to the logjam that would have kept the current rules intact, there was complete unity among the GOP senators for the change.
"Thankfully all our Republicans understood what was at stake and we’ve all hung together," Thune said. "We had all 53 Republicans to do this and we’re going to finish it this week.”
Really, what choice did they have?
As Thune noted, the Democrats have been "almost pathological" in their hatred of Trump, so it was time to do what needed to be done.
