US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) addressed the Senate to highlight what he described as historic productivity in confirming President Trump’s nominees, while criticizing Senate Democrats for ongoing delays.
“We’ve done twice as many confirmations now as what we did under the first Trump administration. But we still have quite a few to go… We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Lankford said during his remarks.
He explained that about 1,200 positions require Senate confirmation and compared current practices with those of previous administrations. “There’s about 1,200 people that have to be confirmed. So typically, things are done by voice vote. Under President George W. Bush, 90 percent of his nominees were actually done by voice vote in the Senate. Under President Obama, 90 percent of those were done by voice vote… So far in this Senate, zero. Every single nominee, even if it was the protocol officer for the State Department or a legislative affairs person in an agency, or the deputy secretary assistant of something literally that no American other than their family knows who they are, they’ve had to go through the full three-hour process, the intervening day to slow this down.”
Lankford further stated: “That has not happened to any president ever in the history of the country. Ever. No president has ever faced this kind of obstruction, ever, for their nominees.”
The senator’s comments come amid ongoing debate over how quickly and efficiently presidential nominees should be considered by the Senate.
