[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 58 (Wednesday, April 3, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2212-S2216]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Nomination of David Bernhardt

  Mr. President, I conclude my remarks by turning briefly to a related 
subject that deals with, I believe, compromised, corrupt Trump 
nominees.
  The Energy and Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to vote 
tomorrow on the nomination of David Bernhardt to be the Interior 
Secretary, but there is developing news--news revealed just last 
night--that ought to be enough to put this flawed nomination on hold.
  According to the Washington Post, ``[t]he Interior Department's 
Office of Inspector General is reviewing allegations that acting 
secretary David Bernhardt may have violated his ethics pledge by 
weighing in on issues affecting a former client, the office confirmed 
Tuesday.''
  I made it clear in Mr. Bernhardt's hearing last week that I believed 
he had ethics problems owed to the appearance that he had been working 
on behalf of former clients while he had served as a public official. I 
am also very concerned about the real possibility that Mr. Bernhardt 
made false statements under oath in his nomination hearing last week. I 
asked the Interior Department's inspector general to look into these 
matters, but she has not had time to respond to my request. The fact is 
that the inspector general is just at the very outset of this process.
  Here is the prospect this body faces. The Senate could be on its way 
to installing an Interior Secretary who

[[Page S2213]]

could almost immediately face an investigation for corruption and lying 
under oath. These are serious allegations that face Mr. Bernhardt, so I 
feel strongly that the vote in the Energy and Natural Resources 
Committee needs to be delayed until they can be investigated fully.
  With all of the Trump nominees who have resigned in scandal--by the 
way, one being the predecessor of whoever will be the head of the 
Interior Department, Ryan Zinke, who, when he came for his confirmation 
hearing, promised nine times he would be like Teddy Roosevelt and left 
under an enormous set of ethical clouds--it is clear this Republican-
controlled Senate has decided that it is going to confirm first, ask 
questions later, and maybe duck all of the hard questions altogether.
  I believe that needs to change right now. It is time to restore 
public trust in this process. I do not believe the Senate should allow 
the Interior Department to turn into a revolving door of corruption and 
scandal. The vote on the Bernhardt nomination, in my view, should not 
proceed tomorrow in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Texas.


                               S. Res. 50

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, over the last 2 years, since the beginning 
of the Trump administration, our Senate Democratic colleagues have 
brought our work to a crawl over judicial and executive branch 
nominees. It is as if they have frustration and surprise over the 
election of President Trump in the first place and still haven't gotten 
over it. This is another way in which they have sought to undermine the 
administration--to deny the President the staff necessary to populate 
the various executive branch Agencies as well as the judiciary.
  The way you do that in the Senate is by stringing out the amount of 
time it takes to confirm nominees who ordinarily would have been 
confirmed by consent or by voice vote--certainly, not by taking 3 days 
or so at a time to generate a confirmation. It is not because these 
nominees are unqualified or even controversial; it is simply because 
this is how the resistance operates at a time when President Trump is 
President of the United States. These nominees are being used as a 
weapon to slow the work of the Senate and, really, to deny us the floor 
time in which to do other things that we might be doing that would be 
beneficial to the American people, and they have been running this play 
repeatedly over the last 2 years.
  In February of 2018, President Trump nominated John Ryder to serve on 
the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The work of the TVA is 
undeniably important, but this isn't the sort of high-profile job that 
typically leads to a contentious nomination. In fact, these board 
positions are normally confirmed by voice vote.
  Mr. Ryder was, by any account, well qualified for the job. He 
received unanimous support from the committee of jurisdiction, the 
Committee on Environment and Public Works. Under normal circumstances, 
he would have been quickly confirmed by the entire Senate. Our 
Democratic friends, instead, decided to delay and delay and delay some 
more and forced the Senate to hold a cloture vote on the nominee, which 
caused him to sit in limbo for 400 days.
  I wonder how many Americans who want to serve their country in some 
positions that require Senate confirmation can afford to put their 
lives on hold and wait for 400 days or more just for the Senate to get 
around to doing something that should be somewhat of a routine job.
  With Mr. Ryder, in the end, the irony would almost be funny if it 
were not so pathetic. Ultimately, he was confirmed by voice vote. For 
400 days, we waited to achieve the result we all knew we were to have 
all along if Mr. Ryder were to hang in there long enough. For 400 days, 
the TVA waited for the vacancy to be filled without there being an end 
in sight, and for 400 days, Mr. Ryder and his family waited and waited 
and waited with uncertainty. Sadly, he is not alone. He is part of a 
long list of nominees who have received similar mistreatment.
  There is one Texan, a friend of mine, who had to wait even longer. 
Susan Combs is a fourth-generation rancher from Big Bend who has led an 
impressive career in both the public and private sectors and has gained 
the respect of virtually every person who has crossed her path.
  She served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, then as 
the first female agriculture commissioner of Texas, and later served as 
the Texas comptroller of public accounts.
  When she was nominated to be the Department of the Interior's 
Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget, I was thrilled, 
and I was happy to introduce her before her committee hearing. Less 
than a month after she was nominated, Susan was unanimously approved by 
the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Again, I was hopeful 
that her nomination would sail through since it, clearly, was not a 
controversial nomination. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
  Here we are, 631 days later, and Susan Combs has still not been 
confirmed. Again, it is not because she is not qualified for the job or 
that she is a controversial nominee. Just the opposite is true. This is 
simply the way our Democratic colleagues have sought to deal with 
nominees from this President.
  If Senate Democrats were delaying well-qualified nominees like Susan 
to make sure they had adequate opportunity to debate their nominations, 
we wouldn't have any disagreement with that, but we know, by their 
actions, that they will stop at nothing to bring the work of this body 
to a screeching halt, particularly during the time of the Trump 
administration.
  Over the last 2 years, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle 
have forced votes on nominees who in previous years would have sailed 
through the Senate. During President Trump's first 2 years, we held 
more than five times the number of cloture votes on nominees as we did 
during the same time for the last six Presidents combined. So to call 
this unprecedented is not an exaggeration, and the long list of 
vacancies is growing.
  Our government is suffering, and the services that we provide to the 
American people are being obstructed as well. The Senate's duty of 
advice and consent is important, but it is not our only job. We have a 
lot of other things we are supposed to do here, and they are falling by 
the wayside while we try to work through these, largely, 
noncontroversial judicial and executive branch nominees.
  Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues' delay tactics have brought 
us to the point at which we really don't have many other options. We 
have tried negotiations. We have been told they will be happy to limit 
postcloture debate time but that, oh, by the way, they will not agree 
to that unless it starts in the year 2021. This is hardly a principled 
position. This is simply about resisting President Trump, his 
administration, and this administration's ability to do the job the 
President was elected to do.
  What we have proposed is something that will not make nominations 
easier to be confirmed. The process will be largely the same, and the 
vote threshold will remain the same. It will simply keep us from 
wasting valuable time that we should be spending on debating and voting 
on other important policies, not widely supported nominees.
  This certainly isn't as radical a change as many of our Democratic 
colleagues are presenting it to be. In January of 2013, current 
Majority Leader Schumer and then Majority Leader Harry Reid led the 
charge to make similar changes in order to process President Obama's 
nominees.
  At that time, Republicans were in the minority. What did we do then? 
Well, we weren't exactly fans of President Obama's, but he had just 
been elected to his second term, and suffice it to say that while we 
were hoping for a different outcome, we weren't about to obstruct his 
ability to populate and staff the various Departments in the Federal 
Government. We didn't obstruct nominees. We didn't sulk. We didn't try 
to prevent the President

[[Page S2214]]

from filling these nominations throughout the entire government. This 
is our government. In fact, we took the opposite approach. Along with 
several of my Republican colleagues, I joined Democrats in voting for a 
resolution that would speed up the consideration process for lower 
level nominees.
  I have to give Senator Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee, a lot 
of credit for negotiating that in the first place. But it has now 
expired, and we are back to the status quo before that temporary change 
went into effect. Like the changes we are talking about today, it 
didn't change the threshold for nominees; it just made the process a 
little more efficient. It received votes from 78 Senators on a 
bipartisan basis. So that is why it is a real head-scratcher that we 
find ourselves where we are today. Unfortunately, I think we know what 
the answer is. This is part of the anti-Trump resistance. 
Unfortunately, it is not playing out just in social media or on TV; it 
is playing out right here in the Senate--what used to be known as the 
world's greatest deliberative body.
  When our colleagues Senator Blunt, chairman of the Rules Committee, 
and Senator Lankford of Oklahoma introduced this resolution, I was 
surprised that our colleagues across the aisle wouldn't do what we did 
back in 2013. Back then, all but one Member of the Democratic caucus 
voted for the resolution--again, something very similar to what we are 
proposing today--but yesterday, they refused to even proceed to debate 
a similar change. They could have offered amendments. They could have 
made changes to the resolution where they thought it fell short. But 
no--their commitment to obstruction remains. It is clear they don't 
really oppose the resolution; they oppose supporting a resolution under 
the President of another party. Indeed, they oppose supporting this 
resolution under President Trump.
  When 78 Republicans voted for a similar change in 2013--as I said, we 
didn't vote for President Obama, but we understood the importance of 
protecting the Senate as an institution and allowing our valuable work 
to continue on behalf of the American people. I wish our colleagues 
across the aisle had that same commitment today.
  Just as I supported this modest change in 2013, I will support it 
again today. This will allow us to make meaningful progress in 
confirming the long list of pending nominees without impeding our 
ability to do our other work, like legislation.
  In particular, there are four district court nominees from Texas I am 
eager to get off the Senate calendar and on the Federal bench.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Hyde-Smith). The Senator from Colorado.
  Mr. BENNET. Madam President, later today, the majority leader will 
use the so-called nuclear option to once again break the Senate rules. 
This is going to be the latest episode in a series of decisions that 
have been made around here--mostly by the majority leader but not only 
by the majority leader--to degrade the Senate's responsibility to 
advise and consent.
  What has happened here is a travesty. We have destroyed--this 
generation of American politicians has decided that somehow we have 
prerogatives that the people who came before us didn't exercise.
  I think part of the problem we have is that people are so sick and 
tired of the dysfunction around this place, they are not even paying 
attention to what is happening here even though, in theory, it is 
happening in their name.
  Two days ago--on the first of April, fittingly--the majority leader 
wrote an op-ed laying out his case. He wrote:

       Since January 2017, for the first time in memory, a 
     minority has exploited procedure to systematically obstruct a 
     President from staffing up his administration.

  Let's read that again.

       Since January 2017, for the first time in memory, a 
     minority has exploited procedure to systematically obstruct a 
     President from staffing up his administration.

  Senator McConnell went on to write:

       Crucial jobs are still being held empty out of political 
     spite.

  He seems to have completely forgotten the Obama administration when 
he was the leader of the minority, when he was systematically denying 
President Obama the right not only to put people in his Cabinet and in 
his administration but to put judges on the bench as well.
  Before President Obama arrived in Washington, the filibuster had been 
used 68 times on this floor--68 times since that rule was created 
sometime right before 1920. In the first 5 years of the Obama 
administration, the Republicans filibustered his nominees or used the 
filibuster in some other way 79 times. It had been used 68 times from 
when the rule was created to when President Obama became President, and 
then over the first 5 years of his administration, they used it 79 
times. And they can't remember a time when a minority systematically 
denied a President the ability to put judges on the court or to staff 
their administration.
  When President Obama was President, they filibustered the Secretary 
of Defense nominee for the first time in the history of America, and he 
was a former Senator and a Republican. His name was Chuck Hagel. They 
filibustered him. Secretary of Defense seems like a pretty crucial 
appointment.
  In President Obama's last 2 years, the Republican Senate confirmed 
only 22 judges. That is a smaller number than at any time since the 
Truman administration. Twenty-two judges was all he got.
  President Obama left 100 vacancies to President Trump to fill--a 
record number. There were more vacancies at the end of his term than 
there were at the beginning.
  It has been a concerted strategy of Senator McConnell's for a 
decade--for more than that--and he has succeeded.
  He led the most famous blockade that has ever happened in the Senate, 
and that was the blockade he led of Merrick Garland.
  When Justice Scalia died 342 days before the end of President Obama's 
term, Senator McConnell responded to that by saying: ``This vacancy 
should not be filled until we have a new President.'' He called 
President Obama a lameduck President. There were 342 days left in his 
term. He had an entire year left in his term.
  Until that point, the Senate had never refused to consider an elected 
President's nominee because the vacancy arose in an election year, 
which they claimed over and over again wasn't the case. Since the 
Nation's founding, the Senate has confirmed 17 Supreme Court nominees 
in election years; it has rejected 2.
  The majority leader would later say:

       One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama 
     in the eye and said, ``Mr. President, you will not fill this 
     Supreme Court vacancy.''

  He did it because he knew he could get away with it, and he thought 
he would roll the dice. It was shameful. And it wasn't true that it was 
consistent with our history; it was completely inconsistent with our 
history.
  Whether you support Donald Trump or you don't support Donald Trump, I 
think you can thank the majority leader for electing Donald Trump 
because by keeping that vacancy on the Court, he made that the issue in 
the election, and he galvanized the Republicans around a candidate who 
otherwise wouldn't have been very appealing to many of them. People say 
that he stole a Supreme Court seat. It is bigger than that--he won the 
Presidency for Donald Trump. And we know what has happened since that 
time.
  But it amazes me that in the name of things not moving quickly 
enough, he can come out here and claim that the most significant thing 
he has ever done is what he did to Merrick Garland and then the record 
he has set putting judges on the circuit courts and the district courts 
since Donald Trump was elected President. Nobody has ever had this many 
judges put on the court as fast as the majority leader has put them on 
the court. Now, for district court judges, he wants to do it in 2 hours 
of time. He is just going to crank the machine until it is not 
available to him anymore, and it has been clear that has been his 
objective from the beginning.
  But it is not just that the judges are conservative judges; it is 
that they are not as good as they used to be.
  You know, until the group of people in this room--including me, by 
the way--in 2013, out of desperation, I came to this floor and voted to 
change the

[[Page S2215]]

rules so that President Obama could actually get some nominees 
confirmed, some judges confirmed, and some administrative appointments 
confirmed. I have said on this floor before that that is the worst vote 
I have taken as a Senator, and I apologize for that vote. I share some 
of the responsibility for where we find ourselves today.
  The majority leader said at that time: ``You're going to come to 
regret this decision.'' And I will say this about him: He was right. I 
do. Not for me and not for the Senate but for the American people who 
are having their judiciary infected by the mindless partisanship of 
this place, which is hopefully temporary partisanship. But those are 
lifetime appointments that we are confirming that we can't take 30 
hours to confirm anymore, and now we are going to do them in 2 hours 
just to make sure we populate the court with conservative judges whose 
views are consistent with the majority leader's and the President of 
the United States.
  But, as I said, it is not just about their point of view, their 
judiciary philosophy, it is also their quality, because if you have to 
earn 60 votes for a lifetime appointment or--when I was in law school 
and you were a qualified judge who was nominated by a President for the 
Supreme Court, you would then command 90 votes or 95 votes, and that 
gave the American people confidence that the judiciary was insulated 
from politics, that it was insulated from partisanship. Now, because of 
what the majority leader has done to the Supreme Court, we are going to 
put people on that Court with lifetime appointments by the barest 
partisan majorities. It is impossible for me to see how that is going 
to build confidence in the judiciary.
  So when he says he has just put it back to the way it was before 
anybody around here started to filibuster circuit court judges, that is 
not true because before that, you would get 90 votes for somebody who 
was qualified for the Supreme Court, and today, you get whatever you 
get from the partisan majority that happens to be in power.
  By the way, I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen when we 
have a President of one party and a majority of another party and there 
is a vacancy on the Supreme Court, or two or three. If we don't change 
our behavior around here, those vacancies are just going to remain 
until we have a President and a Senate of the same party, however long 
that takes. But if you only need to get 51 votes, I guess you don't 
have to be that qualified.
  The Senate confirmed a nominee recently to the Sixth Circuit who 
wrote blog posts peddling conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and 
compared abortion to slavery. He was confirmed 51 to 47. He would never 
have survived the vet before.
  The Senate confirmed a nominee to the Fifth Circuit who dismissed 
concerns about glass ceilings for women, sexual harassment, and the 
gender pay gap as a Trojan horse for government intervention. He was 
confirmed 50 to 47. This man would never have gotten to this floor 
before we changed the rules, and he now has a lifetime appointment.
  The Senate confirmed a nominee for the Eighth Circuit, even though 
the American Bar Association rated him unanimously as ``not 
qualified''--a unanimous rating of ``not qualified,'' and he is now a 
circuit court judge with a lifetime appointment. It has never happened 
in our history. The ABA questioned whether he ``would be able to detach 
himself from his deeply held social agenda and political loyalty.'' He 
was confirmed 50 to 48. They said he was unqualified unanimously 
because they thought his ideology would blind him, and now he has a 
lifetime appointment.
  The Senate confirmed a second judge the ABA deemed unqualified for a 
district court in Oklahoma. According to the ABA, this nominee 
frequently missed work, and when he did show up, it was often in the 
middle of the day. He was confirmed by 52 votes.
  Last December, the Senate confirmed a third judge the ABA found 
unqualified with 50 votes. He barely made it, but Vice President Pence 
made a trip from the White House to break the tie.
  The partisan temper that is destroying this place needs to come to an 
end, and we need to make sure, between now and whenever that happens, 
that we don't take down the rest of government with us.
  The Founders didn't design the court to be an extension of our 
partisan foolishness. The independent judiciary is responsible for 
enforcing the rule of law, which is at the heart of our democratic 
Republic. It is what separates us from so many other countries around 
the world that have failing economies because no one subscribes to the 
rule of law or that are filled with corrupt institutions, where rules 
are bent, broken, or ignored, with no thought about what is going to be 
left for tomorrow but just the looting of the economy for the benefit 
of people today.
  The Constitution makes it clear that the Senate has a 
responsibility--we have a constitutional responsibility--to advise and 
consent on judicial nominations. There is no one else assigned that 
responsibility. The House of Representatives has nothing to do with it.
  Through this decade-long--it is more than that--20-year-long series 
of preemptive retributions, where one party says: If we don't do it to 
them, they are going to do it to us, we are now at the point where we 
are destroying the judiciary, and I think we should pull back from the 
brink. I don't think the majority leader should invoke the nuclear 
option today, should break another rule around here. No one else in 
America runs their operation by breaking the rules.
  Just in this session alone, we have seen not only this, not only this 
violation of our norms and our customs, of the rule of law, of our 
responsibility to advise and consent, we have seen the same people 
support the President's extraconstitutional destruction of the rule of 
law when he claimed an emergency to fund his wall or to fund $5 billion 
for his wall, which, by the way, he said had already been largely 
built.
  Just like the majority leader today is saying, we have a record 
number of judges who have been confirmed since President Trump has been 
put in office, but we are not moving quickly enough so I have to change 
the rules by using the nuclear option.
  I need to declare an emergency to build the wall, even though it is 
almost complete because of my excellent administration.
  It is all gibberish, and it is all meant just to get a result for 
partisan reasons.
  I think when the history is written about this period of our 
political system, this is all going to look like a tragic farce--all of 
it. People are going to know, when they write an op-ed piece on April 
Fools' and say one thing, and they have spent the last 20 years doing 
something else, that is not going to be lost to the pages of history. 
People are going to know how the system worked when we arrived here, 
when the people who were in this Chamber arrived, including myself, and 
maybe in some tiny, little footnote there will be something that says: 
Well, at least Bennet was out here admitting the mistake he made to 
contribute to this disaster.
  For the life of me, I don't know why we aren't correcting course. We 
are free people. Everybody in this Chamber, I think, should have an 
incentive to try to be remembered well and to be remembered as a good 
steward of this place and of the work we did here. I doubt very much, 
when our careers are at an end, what people are going to say is, the 
good news is, they broke the rules.
  I know what the result is going to be today. I know my friend from 
Oklahoma has actually worked hard to see if he could get a bipartisan 
result here, and today that has been impossible, but what I really hope 
is that we can change what we are doing in the Senate so we can protect 
and preserve the independence of our judiciary and that maybe we will 
even move beyond the bipartisanship that is bringing the Senate to its 
knees today.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, Republicans believe, regardless of who 
the President is, they should be able to hire their staff. I can say we 
not only believe that, we practice that.
  In 2013, there was an ongoing debate over nominations with President 
Obama. Democrats and Republicans came together to resolve the time 
issue for nominations under President Obama. Democrats asked 
Republicans to join them to say: Let's fix the problem we have with the 
length of time on

[[Page S2216]]

nominations because it is taking too long, and so they made a proposal. 
It was 2 hours, equally divided--so it would actually be 1 hour--for 
district court judges, 8 hours for other nominees, which again equally 
divided would actually be 4 hours total for other lower nominees, 30 
hours for circuit court, Supreme Court, Cabinet officers.
  Republicans joined with Democrats in 2013 and with 78 votes at the 
beginning of President Obama's second term--and may I remind this body, 
Republicans were not excited about President Obama's second term--
Republicans joined with Democrats on this one principle: Every 
President should be able to hire their own staff and their staff not be 
blocked. When the American people vote for a President, this body 
should respect the vote of the American people and allow that President 
to hire their staff. Now, when President Trump was elected, Democrats 
have 128 times blocked President Trump from getting his nominees--128 
times.
  I have, for now 2 years, met with my Democratic colleagues, and I 
have asked, let's put back into place exactly what Republicans voted 
with Democrats to do. I am asking Democrats to now vote with 
Republicans to do that. They have said no for 2 years.
  So I simplified the proposal and said: Let's just make it 
straightforward and simple, taken from the same principles Harry Reid 
put forward under President Obama. Let's make that permanent, no matter 
who the President is now or in the future. Let's make it consistent and 
straightforward.
  I was told no by every single Democrat, with this one exception. I 
will vote for that proposal as long as it starts in January of 2021. I 
am glad you Republicans joined with Democrats, they would say, to help 
President Obama get nominees, but we will not help President Trump and 
will block him all the way through. Now, if you want to open this up 
for 2021, we will be glad to be able to help.
  I want to reiterate that Republicans believe whoever the President 
is, when the American people select a President, they should be able to 
hire their staff. I wish my Democratic colleagues believed the same 
thing. Because of that, we are making a change today. I have worked for 
months, meeting with Democratic colleagues, trying to find some way we 
could come to an agreement as was done in 2013, where Republicans and 
Democrats came together to resolve this. I have been rebuffed for 2 
years. Not a single Democrat has been willing to join us in this, not a 
single one. That is unfortunate.
  At the end of the day, we will try to restore this body back to how 
it used to function for two centuries, when every President was allowed 
to get a hearing for their nominees and get a vote in the Senate. For 
two centuries, we functioned that way. I think it is not unreasonable 
to function that way again in this body.
  I look forward to this dialogue, and I look forward to the day we can 
get this issue resolved so we can get back to the work of legislation 
because we can't even get to legislation right now because we are 
blocked on nominations. So let's get the nomination issue resolved, as 
we have for two centuries, and then let's get on to legislation and 
finish the task.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, we raise this point today, not just 
because of what has happened to Donald Trump's nominees over the last 2 
years, but we reached this point because 16 years ago the Senator from 
New York started this Senate down a path that was unprecedented in 200 
years. For 200 years, any President's nominees got an up-or-down vote. 
That was the custom, the unwritten rule, if you will.
  Starting in 2003, specifically geared toward a brilliant young lawyer 
named Miguel Estrada, the Senator from New York warped those unwritten 
rules and customs. That has brought us to where we are today. So today 
Senator Schumer will reap what he sowed. I will call it Miguel 
Estrada's revenge.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum call 
be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.