James Lankford

The blue slip issue is, quite frankly, a great conversation piece.

I literally took the exact same language as 2013, removed the sunset, and said this becomes permanent.

They are going to put some people up that are not going to perform well, that Senators from both parties should step back and say our advice and consent is no.

Even 54 would be--that is a larger number of requests even for a cloture vote than the last four Congresses combined.

I think we should do it, and it is not just for this Congress.

The joy of the Senate is the minority can always express their displeasure in a multitude of different ways.

We did not have a confirmed individual, so our farmers and ranchers had to wait for weeks.

The hardest hit right now would be State Department and DOD.

It took about 50 days during the Obama administration, and it took about 30 or 40 days during the Bush administration time and during the Clinton administration.

Let us make it permanent and say this is how we are going to continue to function.

Losing that time period is a great loss to the American people.

We have to determine how we are going to do this.

Something has to be done.

We have to be able to solve it.

We have learned as a body that we are now either going to do nominees or we are going to do legislation, but we cannot do both.

We are not engaging on the issues.

We need to fix this. We need to restore the process to what it once was, and I believe this is an opportunity to do this.

The American people are frustrated with Washington gridlock. They believe that we cannot get even the simplest of things done.

So what Senator Heitkamp is saying is when you get stuck in some process, release the redheads on them.

There are a couple of bills that are in the process of moving through right now.

Now that does not seem like a radical concept to me, but for years I have worked with Census.

I have yet to talk to a single person in the nomination process, for any task, that says, 'This is such a pleasant process.'

I think that is a problem, that we cannot supervise what we cannot see, and they cannot lead what they cannot see.

The Federal Agency Customer Experience (FACE) Act that Senator McCaskill and I have worked on has passed through the Senate already.

We have to make real progress on this and it has been a great frustration.