Political Quotes

“The nomination process is entirely broken. People are sick and tired of bringing their expertise to the Senate and basically being an automaton in a nomination factory. So that is why there is great sympathy for us working together to resolve this. I put forward a somewhat different version of the world from my colleague from Oklahoma and said: Let's do a block of time where multiple people can be debated simultaneously. That alone speeds things up by six to eight times because it is not 2 hours or 120 minutes per nominee. Let's create a motion where we go directly to that block of time, and because of the block of time, you don't have to have cloture on it in order to vote. Let's speed up how we hold those votes. I felt we could get to wiping out the backlog through some of the agreements that were done before August and by accelerated consideration and preserve the ability to vote on each nominee. I had concerns about the en bloc because I think we have a constitutional responsibility, if there is a bad apple, to weigh in on that and be accountable to our constituents on whether we favor or disfavor that individual.”