Democrats are doing everything they can to protest Barrett vote: Sen. Thune

he is the majority whipper there so senator always good to have you thank you for coming in on Saturday I know you guys are working thanks today I was talking to your colleague uh just before senator Casey I was talking to senator Cornyn of texas earlier you are working today and i is it to get ready for the Barrett nomination is it to counter democratic moves to either push that vote back or do something to blunt it what well kind of all the above actually but I mean mainly the reason we’re here is so that democrats can continue to protest uh we had a series of procedural votes yesterday they’re trying to do everything they can to delay or block her nomination and the Senate is in session this weekend we are setting up for a vote tomorrow at one o’clock it’s what we call a cloture vote it’s a procedural vote as long as we have every republican here and available

we’ll win that and that will set up a final vote on judge Barrett’s nomination for Monday evening but under the senate rules there are 30 hours of post-cloture debate we expect the democrats to use all those hours so that they can continue to demonstrate to their supporters out there that they’re protesting this and doing everything they can to stop it and that’s essentially what we’re doing today they’re going to come up with what we call live unanimous consent requests on the floor we have to have somebody there to object to those they’ll be making speeches throughout the day and both today and tomorrow but right now we’re on a glide path to get to this vote sometime Monday evening presumably unless they yield time back and we are going to confirm her as a justice to the supreme court and

that is a very exciting thing for the court and for this country senator um do you know that in fact all 53 republican senators will be there for the vote and will vote for the judge we will have i hope everybody there that’s you know the key is making sure that uh that we have full attendance for a big vote like this you know we may not have all 53 but we’ll have enough to confirm her we need 51 votes out of the 53 republicans and you know obviously uh there are a couple of our folks who are continuing to evaluate and look at her record but in the end, we’re fully confident that when Monday rolls around we’re going to have the necessary votes to confirm her to the court and everybody who meets her Neil including her opponents the democrats can’t help but walk away impressed with their qualifications

there is no question that the democrats obviously are very dug in on this over what they feel are process issues and obviously ideology issues but she has demonstrated that she’s not somebody who’s going to bring an ideology to the bench she’s somebody who is going to take the law the constitution the facts and in an, as they are written and apply them in an impartial way and that’s exactly what we want to see injustice on the supreme court you’ll be stunned to hear that many democrats don’t believe that but senator um i’d be curious is the vice president going to be around i i don’t even know why I say Justin gays but I guess just in case right i mean the vice president obviously is the president of the senate and if there is a tie would cast a deciding vote um yes presumably he will be available if necessary I don’t anticipate that we will need him

but we want to we don’t want to leave anything to chance here this is a really important vote one of the most consequential things that the united states senate does and we expect to carry out that duty and that responsibility here in the next couple of days it’s safe to say still that uh just as in the judiciary committee itself no democrats will be participating no democrats will be voting on Monday um that would be an historic first by either party just snubbing on a nomination altogether um is that still likely the case yeah i mean i think that’s that’s the case they’re under so much pressure from their leadership right now this has become a very unfortunately the democrats have really politicized the court by their tactics and what they’ve done not showing up at the judiciary committee where her nomination was reported out not showing up yesterday on the floor when it was called up they’re doing everything they can to protest this but the truth of the matter is a lot of democrats look at the court as an auxiliary legislature

where they can try and get policy outcomes and results that they can’t get through the two political branches of our government and that’s not what the court is about and judge Barrett represents what we believe the court should be about and that is a constitutionalist and somebody who is going to in an impartial way apply the law and the constitution and so clearly they are they’re sore about this they’re not happy about it it’s unfortunate it’s come to this because it used to be that these nominations were about qualifications in the last 30 years the democrats have consistently changed the rules going back to the bork nomination the all the judges they tried to block when George Bush was president united states and that’s kind of permanently changed the atmospherics around here when it comes to processing judicial nominations but that can’t stop us from carrying out our constitutional responsibility of advice and consent here in the senate and we’re going to carry that out

today tomorrow and on monday I’m sending you basically you’ve got to get back to work here on stimulus it looks dead to me it’s not happening am I right i think that’s a fair bet they’re still talking but the idea that we could even mechanically process it and get it across the senate floor between now and the election becomes increasingly remote as each day passes the house have to be called back in they got to write the language we’d have to follow all the procedural you know deal with the procedural hurdles that we would have to deal with in the senate but my view on that neil is it’s not a question of if it’s a question of when this will get done we know we have to do more we just think it ought to be targeted it ought to be fiscally responsible it shouldn’t be this all or nothing approach that nancy pelosi is proposing which is you you do it my way or the highway and it’s way too much money it’s spending money on things that are unrelated to the coronavirus

we believe we need to do more to help businesses out there and we’ve actually voted in the senate now several times on legislation that would do just that that would provide unemployment insurance help for businesses help for schools that are continuing to open up safely supporting resources for vaccines and therapeutics and testing money for the post office money for farmers i mean we’ve we’ve put we’ve moved a bill on the floor now twice in the senate but the democrats have blocked it so in the end when the smoke clears after the election hopefully we can sit down and people can in good faith start to compromise but right now my impression is that the house democrats and speaker Pelosi would much rather have the issue than they would have a solution and we want a solution all right senator john tune very good catching up if you’ll be healthy be well safe