Pressed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson Wednesday night on the relative lack of progress on the GOP’s agenda in the first weeks of the Trump administration, Texas Senator John Cornyn pointed to relentless resistance by Senate Democrats to the President’s nominees for why there’s so much gridlock.
Cornyn, a conservative who sits on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Daily Caller founder that the slow pace of confirmations for cabinet and sub-cabinet nominees is sidelining Republican efforts to move on to more substantive elements of their program.
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Carlson drew a stark comparison to the opening weeks of the Obama administration eight years ago, enumerating at least four pieces of major legislation the Democrat-controlled Congress had passed and sent to President Obama’s desk. “They’d done an awful lot,” Carlson said. “This Congress, the Republican Congress, doesn’t seem to have done much at all.”
“Why hasn’t anything been done so far, exactly?” he asked Cornyn.
“The main reason is because Democrats have been dragging their feet on nominations,” Cornyn answered. “There’s no reason to deny the President his cabinet other than just to burn up time and make it impossible for us to turn to other legislation.”
In Cornyn’s estimation, with Democratic resistance, only about three nominees could be considered each week, an agonizingly slow pace. “It’s enormously frustrating,” he told Carlson.