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WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined Martha MacCallum on Fox News.
On confirming President Trump’s nominees:
“I feel really good about where these nominees are in the process. Some of them haven’t had their hearings yet. You know, Tulsi hasn’t had hers, RFK hasn't had his, but Kristi Noem has had hers, Scott Bessent was yesterday, Pete Hegseth earlier this week – all of whom, I think, have performed really well in front of the committee.
“And so I’m hopeful that they’ll get votes coming out of the committee, reported to the floor. And if and when that happens, I will do everything in my power to ensure that these people get installed in their positions and are able to implement the president’s agenda.”
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“As soon as they come out of the committee – and they can’t until the president officially nominates them, which is Monday, when he’s sworn in, he’ll sign the paperwork, the committees will get to work, they’ll report ‘em to the floor, and then we’ll start grinding through them on the Senate floor – but my hope and expectation is that we can get a lot closer to the Obama standard than to what they did to Trump back in 2017 in his first term in office. So I think that it’s going to require some level of cooperation with the Democrats.”
On the Laken Riley Act:
“The Democrats clearly are out of step with the American people. I mean, this open-border policy of the Biden-Harris administration has been an absolute disaster. We’ve had 585 people apprehended, either at points of entry or between points of entry that are on the terrorist watchlist since October of 2021. And then all the criminal elements and gang activity and everything else that comes with it, and we’ve seen the effects of that. Laken Riley is a perfect example. And so we led out with that piece of legislation, because it is so straightforward and, I think, understandable to everybody across this country. But I’m hoping what that signals is that we will get Democrats to work with us on other issues pertaining to the border.”
On Republicans’ agenda:
“I think we have a unique opportunity in history. This opportunity doesn’t come along very often, and sometimes it doesn’t last very long. You know, two years from now, we could lose the House or the Senate, but we have unified control of the government, which enables us to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do – and I think a moment in history with a leader like President Trump, who is reform-minded, who brings a strength and a leadership style that I think enables the people who work with him on his team to do things that perhaps otherwise couldn't be done, and I think the country’s ready for that.
“I think the election showed that, and that it’s up to us here in the House and the Senate, to do everything we can to be good partners and to do as much as we can, as quickly as we can, to get his people in place and then to work with them, enable them to do the jobs that he’s asking them and that we need them to do on behalf of the American people.”
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“On the bigger issues of what we can accomplish, the very fact of unified government enables us, because of a procedure called budget reconciliation, to be able to move legislation with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to 60. And so you can do tax legislation there. You can do spending cuts.
“We hope to do some things on the border. We hope to do some things on national security and some things on energy. And there’s a big question in this town about whether that’s one bill or two bills and, you know, what’s the process, and all the tactical decisions. But in the end, to me, it’s about getting the result, and so how much of it gets done quickly will depend on how quickly the House and the Senate can sort of grind through what I think is a very big agenda.
“But in the end, we need to be measured by what we’re able to get done. And whether it gets done in the first 30 days or in the first 60 days, or beyond that is still an open question. But what I can tell you is the determination to work with the president and his team to ensure that, one, we strengthen the economy, that we extend tax relief so people aren’t faced with a four-and-a-half-trillion dollar tax increase at the end of the year, that we renew American energy dominance in this country, that we rebuild America’s military, and that we secure our southern border.
“I mean, those are all things on which we agree and how we get there is still a function of the House and the Senate trying to work together. We have very different rules and procedures and different cultures, and, but we’re going to get there.”
On the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):
“I’m fully supportive, and we want to be supportive in any way that we can of drilling down and figuring out, how do we make this huge federal bureaucracy work more efficiently and in a less costly way. I’m a big believer in distributed power.
“In Washington, what you have is consolidated, centralized power. And I think you get a lot better government, a lot more responsive government, when you distribute power out of Washington, get it back to state and local governments – governors, state legislators, you know, county and city officials, and frankly, in the hands of the American people, is where it should be.”
On President Trump’s mandate:
“I think that the president received from the American people a decisive mandate. It was clear that people wanted business as usual disrupted in Washington. And a lot of these nominees that he's put forward, I think, are going to be change agents in places where we desperately need that. You know, just the very fact of even the, you know, DOGE effort, is a scrub that’s long overdue.
“I mean, this is something that this federal government needed. I think of the 24 biggest departments or agencies of the federal government, last year, less than half of their office space was filled, and only 6 percent of the federal workforce is back in the office full-time. I mean, so there’s a huge opportunity here, I think, to reduce the amount of bureaucratic red tape and regulation and just bureaucracy and the weight of the federal government in ways that will hopefully streamline it and make it more efficient.
“And I think a lot of the nominees that you’ve heard from that the president has put forward have as their objective and their goal, and certainly the objective of President Trump, and I think a lot of these nominees are here to implement that.”
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“Americans were incredibly frustrated during the last four years with the open border policies; with this rampant inflation that’s costing them over $13,000 more a year than it was when Biden and Harris took office; I think with, you know, the state of our national security and what’s happening around the world, I think there was a big frustration with the American people, and they wanted leadership that is strong, that projects strength, not weakness, on the global stage. I think they want somebody who is interested in achieving efficiency and cost-effectiveness in our government here in this country, and that will put policies in place that will strengthen and grow our economy, not grow the federal government.”
On TikTok:
“[I]t’s important that we have screens and filters on some of this stuff because these are national security interests. I assume the president, as he assumes his position, will want to make sure that our national security interests are served. The best solution, in my view, has always been for it to be sold to an American company. Perhaps that can happen, but we’ll see.
“There are some moving parts around this, and we’re going to have a new sheriff in town here in a few days, and he’ll have a lot to say about it, but I think it’s important that these things all be screened and filtered through: Does this make America more safe and more prosperous and the American people's information safe and secure?”