John Thune

So it's situational for them.

It's all about political power.

And now that they are on the outside, they're gonna use this to their advantage.

I just think that we ought to be able to do this the old-fashioned way, and that is open up the government by just having five more Democrats vote with us.

And that's all it's going to take.

So we shouldn't be in this.

Everything is harder than it should be right now because of Trump derangement syndrome.

But I still think at some point there are going to be some rank-and-file Democrats who break with their leadership and do the right thing for the country, and that is open up the government.

Right.

We cleared the backlog.

The Democrats have completely shut it down.

I mean, we were we were forced to be here.

We've been here more days, more hours, cast more votes than any Senate in history, at least the last 40 years.

as a result of the Democrats' obstruction.

And so we did make a change in the rules that enables us to start processing some of the executive branch nominations in batches, and that's enabled us to catch up.

But there are more coming.

And on the judiciary side, we're doing some this week.

We're going to do a circuit court at the end of the week nom.

We're doing district court judges.

We had about 50 of those that were in the backlog.