CongressDonald TrumpFeaturedPoliticsRecess AppointmentsRon JohnsonSenateSenate DemocratsWisconsin

Johnson Cites Backlog of Nominees Senate Democrats Are Stalling

TONY KINNETT: Well, with the situation developing with [acting U.S. Attorney] Alina Habba in New Jersey, the situations regarding [Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.], the ethics violation possibility, there has never been a bigger need for the American people to see confirmations moving through the Senate on the express track.

So, we’re bringing on [Republican] Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, friend of the show, to talk a little bit about this, some of the rescissions packages coming down the line. It’s a very, very busy time.

Thanks for joining us, Senator.

SEN. RON JOHNSON: Well, Tony, I hope you’re doing well.

KINNETT: As well as a guy in this news cycle. I don’t know if either of us are going to get much sleep, but at least maybe we can get a few of these confirmations through. You know what I’m saying?

JOHNSON: Oh, I really wish the media were honest, not so biased, so they could be really talking about how outrageous the Democrat obstruction is, in terms of confirming members of the administration. The elections matter. I think Republicans generally respect that. I mean, we’ll hold up a nomination or two.

But frequently at this stage, where you’re confirming deputies and assistant secretaries, that type of thing, oftentimes these things go en bloc, or they’re approved by unanimous consent. You don’t, what we call, run the clock on all these.

Democrats are making us run the clock on every nominee, every confirmation, so we’ve got a backlog. Last time I heard, something like 136 individuals just waiting to be confirmed. And when you recognize it, in order to fill up an administration to staff them, you need to confirm something like over 1,000 people. Now, I personally think that is way out of control as well. I can see maybe a couple hundred Senate confirmations.

Let us do our ‘advice and consent.’ I think elections do matter. But again, unfortunately, the Democrats are obstructing this, and I don’t see any end in sight. We’re going to have to break this logjam, either by just voting continuously, overnight, possibly recess appointments. Whatever it takes, I’m willing to do it.

KINNETT: So I mean, I’m sure that you don’t have to tell us that the second assistant secretary to the deputy of the postmaster is probably not something that should require a full two weeks’ worth of debate and then a full Senate vote on.

I don’t know if that’s the deepest, most important view of the American people that that particular position and positions of that level are, again, deserving of that whole running-out-the-clock approach.

JOHNSON: Oh, it’s not two weeks. I mean, for certain judges at least 30 hours. Otherwise, it’s a couple hours.

But that all takes time, and you can’t do them unless you get consent to all combine. So, it’s just one at a time. You grind it out, you move closer on one nominee while you vote the confirmation of another, and you just kind of rinse and repeat.

But again, it’s a Democrat obstruction. They’re going to do everything they can to sabotage the second Trump administration, just like they did everything they could to sabotage the first Trump administration.

KINNETT: Although they do have fewer items in the arsenal. I mean, even Chuck Schumer bragging about the number of judges he had ready to go, even those are starting to be stretched a little bit thin as the Supreme Court rules against most kinds of universal injunctions.

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER, D-N.Y.: “Our democracy is at risk because Donald Trump shows that he wishes to violate the laws in many, many different ways.

“The good news here is we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time.”

KINNETT: Now they are throwing every fit from the parliamentarian all the way over to, again, as we’ve talked about here, these 30-hour rigmaroles stitched one after another.

Do you think that we could see … I don’t know how we see out of this. Do you maybe vote some through via packages, like a group for a certain agency voted all for at the same time? Can you even do that? What do we see as a way out of this in the future?

JOHNSON: Oh, not without consent. And so I think the easiest way out of this is, literally, go into recess and have President Trump do recess appointments.

Once he’s done that, when we come back in, we can just do those confirmations in the normal course of business, but we would get these people in place. They can serve for a year. That would be pretty significant versus leading these agencies without their political appointees.

And the problem with all these departments and agencies, they are, by and large, populated by liberal bureaucrats. Not all hard partisans, but enough hard partisans to do everything possible to frustrate and sabotage the Trump administration.

I mean, we’re seeing this across the board. I know Bobby Kennedy, for example, wants radical transparency. We issued a friendly subpoena to get all the information on COVID and our miserable response to it. We were getting dribs and drabs. Bobby finally broke the logjam last week, and we got a massive data dump so we’re sifting through that.

Department of Justice, I know that a bunch of liberals just simply couldn’t serve under President Trump, so they quit. Others were terminated. So, there’s a pretty big hole of a couple hundred attorneys. The Department of Justice need those personnel.

The problem is because of lawfare, because the Democrats are so vicious, they’ll destroy the careers of people who would just, for example, represent President Trump. … And so that’s a huge deterrent for other people stepping up to the plate to serve this president’s Department of Justice.

So, Democrats, radical leftists, it’s the same thing: They are relentless. They are vicious. They play politics. It’s a blood sport to them because it’s all about power, and they will pull out all the stops. They break every precedent. They destroy every norm.

And, of course, they’ve got the media that doesn’t say a word. I mean, if this were reversed and Republicans were engaged in this level of obstruction, we would hear no end to it. There’d be all kinds of pressure for us to stop.

KINNETT: … I mean, they’d have everyone camped outside of everyone’s offices, everyone’s residence. It would be insane. But they are focused on something that is definitely more in your wheelhouse, something that you have been hitting time and time again.

I remember back when I was in Wisconsin, and you and I were talking away from some of the national brand of things, the concerns about illegal immigrants who are not extremely popular, for example, in Hispanic central communities like Delavan in Wisconsin.

They are not a fan of the illegal immigrants that had access to Medicare and Medicaid, and through these rescission packages, through the One Big, Beautiful Bill and that entire collaborative effort and the compromise and the exchange there. The Republican Party was able to make it a lot more difficult for those who are not citizens of the United States to receive medical aid on the taxpayer dime.

And now all of these articles are coming out saying, “Oh, all of these illegals are undocumented people of whatever, they’ve lost all of their medical coverage.”

I was told, you were told, you were lectured, for example, by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that, “Well, you know, Sen. Johnson, these people aren’t even receiving Medicaid and Medicare. You’re making it all up,” and now they expect us to mourn the loss of it because it was happening anyway.

JOHNSON: You’re exactly right. Again, it’s not a level playing field. It’s not a fair fight. But I think the vast majority of Americans do not believe that people that have gained entry into this country illegally, that they ought to be sucking down these benefits, costing the federal government, one estimate is about $160 billion a year, just to provide benefits for people who have come into this country illegally.

Now, unfortunately, the Biden administration, Democrats in Congress, they welcome these people in, and they don’t care about the eligibility for these programs. They’re more than happy to bankrupt these programs.

KINNETT: Absolutely right. And the bankrupting programs are not going to be on the backs of the illegal immigrants benefiting from those programs. They’re going to be on your constituents, and those who are in our broadcasting network and range in the Rust Belt, who are paying tons of their income taxes right now toward supporting all of these programs.

But again, this is stuff that you and I agree on. We know this.

The last question that I want to ask you, and I have been asked to ask you this: Are you tasting ink through your fingers? And I’m not just asking this as a softball question here.

You are essentially tasked as a senator with being up-to-date on all of these reports you talked about, from Secretary Kennedy, from Tulsi Gabbard slinging things, over to the House. I know you’re catching up on that over on the Senate side as well. There are all of these reports coming in from the years of the bureaucratic corruption and stagnation, prior administrations.

I mean this honestly here. How do you find time to read through all of this? How are you staying up on it? And that’s again, less a journalistic question and more as a personal. I feel like I’m reading 24/7 these days. How are you keeping up with this?

JOHNSON: Oh, through podcasts like this. But no, seriously, there’s so much information out there when you’ve been in the tip of the spear in some of these investigations.

Now, first of all, I really applaud Tulsi Gabbard, what she’s doing, providing the documentation that confirms what we either knew or suspected. But one thing I have to admit in terms of the whole Crossfire Hurricane, the Russian Collusion Hoax, that what she’s releasing, none of this is really new to me.

I mean, I knew the Steele Dossier was an invention and political dirty trick dreamed up by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton approved it. That there was a meeting in the Obama White House, because John Brennan caught wind through his intelligence sources that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had cooked up this scheme.

KINNETT: And all on the record.

JOHNSON: Yeah. Rather than deep-six it, they decided to use it. They went with it and put America through political turmoil that has not ended, even to this day.

And these people, from my standpoint, are criminals. They are bad people. They have interfered in our election, in our political process to a far greater extent, orders of magnitude worse than anything China or Russia could ever hope to achieve. These people need to be held accountable.

KINNETT: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a position or a situation in which the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA could genuinely violate the Espionage Act of 1917 and be braggadocious about it in these emails.

You know what it’s like to send emails that you know are going to be public record for eternity. You got to be really careful. When I was a teacher, same thing. You’re very careful about what you put on public email servers, and they were open about it.

I know we’re running out of time here. Do you think, just on kind of a hunch, that we’re going to see Senate Majority Leader [John Thune, R-S.D.] move forward with possibly canceling part of the upcoming recess? Or do you think we might move into some of these appointments or recess appointments? Or is this still being hashed out among the Senate?

JOHNSON: Oh, it’s being hashed out, but again, even if we’d stay in session, you got to grind through it. I’m not sure how many of these people we could really get confirmed. Dozens? We got a backlog of 136.

So, from my standpoint, I think what President Trump ought to do is actually encourage us to take recess and recess-appoint these people. Then he can put these people in position. He doesn’t have to wait. Yeah, I think so. This is the time to pull the trigger on recess appointments.

KINNETT: Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, thanks for taking a couple of minutes to come by and hash some of this stuff out. Appreciate the work you’re doing, and good luck getting some rest.

JOHNSON: Have a good day.

Source link

Related Posts

1 of 8