James Lankford

Obviously, there was a question on cost on that for physicians.

The existence of this black market for buprenorphine has more to do with the fact that we are not making that treatment available to the people who need it.

In Oklahoma, there is currently a physician going through the process right now that saw 90 patients a day and was writing narcotics 'scripts to almost every one of them as they came through.

This Committee would have an expectation that if there are things you do not have access to, that you need access to for oversight, that you would come back to us.

Thank you for stepping up and going through this very long, difficult process, because our Nation needs people to both be good counsel for the intelligence community and to be good inspectors general for that community.

We are gaining muscle memory that every nominee... we are going to still go through the cloture.

Cloture still should not be used--and his term was--except in extraordinary circumstances.

My state does expect me to vote.

At the end of the day, if the pause on this is to say, well, let us wait 3 years and we will see if a Democratic President is elected and then we will want to talk about changing the rules on that, I do not see any particular enthusiasm…

If we are going to get back to actually operating, I would suggest that we actually get back to operating.

What can be done to actually get us back to where we can have debate again.

We should certainly do that.

If the majority is serious about rules reform, we need bipartisan support.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem willing to abdicate our advice and consent responsibilities and just act as a rubber stamp.

The White House owes us a lot more people to be able to put through the nomination process, but even if they got here, we are not moving them at the pace that they actually need to be moved.

I would guess somewhere around 150 fewer than President Obama at this point, maybe more than that, that President Trump has put out than President Obama.

Republicans stepped across the aisle in 2013, met with Democrats, and voted with 78 votes at the beginning of President Obama's term to say we are going to change this and to not do extended debate for all of this.

I think there is no easy moment to do it.

I would think that would be appropriate only in the sense that if it is not being used, go ahead and bring it to the vote and get it resolved.

Dual tracking is something that has been done by the Senate by unanimous consent before.

I would not only in the sense that that seems to be a genie out of the bottle at this point.

We can either do nominations or legislation, but the Senate cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

With some rare exceptions, obviously, with some very heated Cabinet officials, this rule that I am proposing would not change those a bit.

It is clear that this is being used to slow down the other work of the Senate and for no other purpose.

The elimination, obviously, of the 60-vote protection, except for the Supreme Court, was done by a Congress controlled by Democrats.